An Ode To The Most Versatile Communication Tool!
On this day of love, I write to you with fondness.
Dear Exclamation Point,
I have been in love with you since the moment I laid eyes on you. You have helped me exhibit happiness, dismay and toned down my passive aggressiveness. You’ve helped me navigate a world where we talk less and text more.
Omg! Yass Queen! Is just not the same without you. Neither is ‘Happy Birthday’ or for that fact ‘Nice pic’. I only know about five acceptable adjectives for something that I like, for example when an uncle shares his Tuscan holiday photos on Facebook, I have to seem genuinely awed. I can say either awesome, great, nice, superb or amazing. If I say stupendous, inconceivable, phenomenal and mind boggling I might betray my internal sardonic bitterness. The only way I can dress up a bona fide sentiment is with an innocuous looking exclamation point. Superb photos!
It’s easy to overlook you. Your best work is done without the realization that you are there. You’ve been helping women write emails that tone down their aggressiveness for years. Where a “Send this report out ASAP” would suffice, we write,
“Hi! We need to send this report out as soon as possible! Our client has been waiting for 2 weeks! Thanks a lot!”
It makes us sound like bubbly airheads but that’s much better than sounding bossy(gasp!) or domineering. Thank you for helping us assuage bruised egos whilst giving uncomfortable orders since the invention of email!
It’s not just external, you help my family and friends validate facets of my daily life too. If my friend just said ‘Good haircut’ to a photo of my newly styled hair I would go ahead and reevaluate all of my recent life decisions, such as my cute snow boots or the color of my car, wondering if I have lost all sense of taste. If my decadent butternut squash photo on instagram just got a ‘Yum’ sans exclamation point, it would put me off sharing my dishes for at least 3 months and leafing through recipes to find just that right garnish. It would just throw me off my game.
You do face some tough competition from Emojis though. The emoji which denotes ‘laughing so much that tears are spilling out of my eyes’ is really giving you a run for your money. It’s replacing you as a reaction to funny texts. And I must admit that even I use the ‘grimace’ emoji to convey great dismay whereas previously I would say ‘Oh yikes!’ Happy Birthday now has the ‘fireworks emoji’, ‘cake emoji’, ‘champage emoji’ at it’s end and your void isn’t even being felt. I’m sorry that you are becoming obsolete, ‘sad face’ emoji.
I choose to write my love letter to you, not the shiny new object on my iphone keyboard. I still turn to you when I need to convey that I “Nailed It!!!” Or when I need to say ‘No!’ but it needs that dash of incredulousness? When I want to convey my immense happiness that my nephew has taken his first steps, I need to convey that sentiment and I write “Yay!!! That’s amazing!!!” Sometimes I need to say “I love you!” when a heart emoji just won’t do the trick. Without you it just wouldn’t be the same. You help me convey my true feelings to my loved ones and what more can I ask for from a punctuation mark?
Yours truly.
