Exclamation Marks

I once went to the town of Westward Ho! in Devon, which is a bleak and barren place: boarded-up amusement arcades behind a tempest-beaten promenade. However, it's the only place in Britain with an exclamation mark in the name. This is because the town was built from scratch in 1865 as a resort that would feed off the popularity of Charles Kingsley's novel Westward Ho!. The town was a marketing tie-in.

Kingsley's novel derived its name from the renaissance play Westward Ho! by Thomas Webster and John Dekker about a group of people who take a trip up the Thames to Brentford. The title came from the Thames boatmen who were going upstream who would shout "Westward Ho!"

So Westward Ho! being in the West of England is pretty much a coincidence.

There's also a town in Canada that is called Saint-Louis-du-Ha!-Ha!, but nobody seems to know why.

Exclamation marks are so rare in formal writing that many of the style guides simply ignore them like the drunk at a wedding reception. The Economist and Gowers' Plain Words fall into this camp (if you can fall into a camp) while The Times and The Guardian limit themselves to the three words: "nearly always unnecessary" and "do not use".

Fowler starts by arguing that !s must be used for exclamatory statements such as What a pity! or How dull! and wishes proper such as May the force be with you! This does not work for a normal reader. Alec Guinness did not speak with an exclamation mark in his voice and the main purpose of punctuation is to denote what voice the sentence should be read in. Indeed, this is not simply a purpose but an inevitable outcome of punctuation. Fowler vaguely concedes this point but then reels off a list of varied emotions and varied voices. To be fair to Fowler, punctuation and voice change more with fashion than most matters verbal, so I shall leave him be.

Instead, I shall go with Bryson who says that exclamation marks should be used to display "strong emotion or urgency" and nothing else. They mean that the voice should be raised. Eureka! The roadsigns that say STOP! are correct. The swooning women who cry "Oh God!" are correct. The Fun Facts columns that say "A cheetah can run at 75mph!" are wrong, unless you go around shouting at people about cheetahs, which I confess I sometimes do.

The crime against humanity, though, is the exclamation mark used to designate a joke. I took the main road out of town, but the police made me put it back!!! is a capital offence and if you ever do it I will hunt you down like a dog (I hunt dogs) and then do foul things to your corpse.

Worst, though, is an exclamation mark used to indicate a joke that isn't a joke. This is a variation of the person who exclaims, "I'm always losing my car keys,' and then laughs as though they had said something funny. Such people look at me hoping that I will laugh too, but I do not. I do not. I return their glance with a still, acidic gaze and reach for my set of recreational scalpels.

If this is replicated in print I get properly angry. I once received a wedding invitation that said that you could drive to the ceremony "if you can find a place to park!!!!!"

Five exclamation marks.

And then, when the church was set ablaze during the service with the doors locked from the outside, the police had the temerity to call my crime "motiveless".

Serves them right!!!!!

Novels of Misspelling

Gentle reader, I should warn you that there may be some coarse language in this post. In fact, I'm sure there will be.

The first line of the deliciously delicate novel Londonstani goes like this:

Serve him right he got his muthafuckin face fuck’d, shudn’t b callin me a Paki, innit.

You see, what the author is doing, which is very clever, is to tell us the accent in which the character is speaking. That’s why he spells mother as mutha. That’s how they pronounce it in Hounslow.

Etonians, Oxonians and indeed all those who don’t live in Hounslow pronounce mother as mow-thear. We also pronounce the e in fucked, which we write as fuckèd. A typical conversation at my boarding school would run something like this:

- Is your mow-thear coming to visit you this weekend?

- I’m afraid not; she’s too busy being fuckèd by my faither.

- Noi.

That’s how it was. As for the b – well I’m not going to tell you how we pronounce b because then you would be able to move among us undetected and it would be worse than the worst excesses of the French revolution.

What really gets my goat about all this, though, is that he spells right with a ght. I can only deduce from this that the ght is always pronounced in full around the farther reaches of the Piccadilly Line.

In the pubs near me (North West London, far from Hounslow) people employ a strange rhetorical device whereby a noun is immediately followed by a superfluous pronoun. The conversations are hard to punctuate but they go something like this:

Mike, he reckons that Arsenal, they’re going to win the league this year. Me, I reckon that Chelsea, they’ve got the strength and depth for a long and bitter campaign.

That really is how they speak, like the bits of newspaper at the bottom of an old lady's drawer. Yet the funny thing in the gritty novels of misspelling like Londonstani is that after throwing in a bunch of oaths and curses the author almost always forgets to do anything so extended as to make a line of dialogue sound structurally convincing.

In Carl Hiaasen’s novel Skinny Dip, which is set in Florida, one word is misspelled throughout. Son of bitch is consistently rendered sumbitch, which is perfect because that is how they pronounce it in the Profound South. The word only pops up every ten pages or so, but that one eccentricity of spelling combines with Hiaasen’s excellent ear for the structures of speech to keep the accent in the reader’s mind.

But those writers who misspell more than once a page are almost always cloth-eared when it comes to patterns of speech.

The only exception I can think of to this rule is Dickens who, of course, rendered speech perfectly but still made poor people reveal their lack of education by saying woz instead of was.

It shouldn’t really be me writing this post. Mrs Malaprop – a former Miss Hounslow finalist with relations in Florida – could have knocked it together better than I have done, but I fear the swearing would have made her take fright, which she would pronounce friggahut.

Sir John Suckling from Hounslow

UPDATE: Mrs Malaprop informs me that nobody in Hounslow would ever pronounce the t in innit.