Tim Blair

may i propose the first immutable law of right-wing blogs? unnecessary and annoying exclamation marks and lots of them:
"Unpossible!"; "Fun, fun, fun!"; "MILLIONAIRE BLOGGER!"; "Maybe it is!" etc. actually, some bloggers have this problem worse than others, and i nominate andrea harris as a repeat offender [toward the bottom]. take the number 1 off her keyboard in my opinion.

For a nice demolition is Philip Adams, click on my name.

Gee, adam, bored today, aren't you.

I also use commas, and CAPITAL LETTERS.

yeah i am bored today, thankyou for asking. also, capital letters require too much effort what with the holding down of the shift key as you type, so i don't use them too often. commas i use, all the time.

so thanks for your warm concern re my writing style and my level of boredom. let it never again be said that right-wingers are heartless.

So that's why you don't like the exclamation point. Because one needs to use the shift key to make it. So why this strange antipathy towards the shift key? Did you have a particularly cruel typing instructor?

i've never had a typing instructor. it's not that i don't like exclamation points, i just dislike it when they are used frequently. an exclamation point functions as the grammatical equivalent of a wink and a nudge, more or less bludgeoning the reader into accepting the writer's hilarity. you can only do that so many times before it becomes annoying.

my antipathy toward capitals is that i'm lazy, so lazy.

What can I say, Tim is a huge capitalist.

Every single post at Adam's site includes an exclamation point.

i'm flattered that you looked, but, uh, you're full of shit. 6 out of 34, dude [excepting the exclamation mark i can't get rid of in the comments line, of course].

I don't except those. Every post, duuuuude!!!!

And even excepting those, you're still running an Exclamation Percentage of 17.6, which isn't a whole galaxy removed from my own 26.4%.

How about phed up with phat phartbreath phuckphace Phil!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

note my objection is with "unnecessary and annoying exclamation points", of which you'll find, in my opinion, none on my blog. of the 6 exclamation points that i own up to, one is alternate text for a picture, three are quotes of other people, and the other two are necessary, if a little annoying. so, at most, 2 out of 34 [5%], which i think you'll find is a little different from 26.4%.

Snicker. The nitpicker picked on. I think I'm going to refer to adam as Mr. Style Manual from now on. Oh well, let's play:

In case any of you are confused as to what Mr. Style Manual's problems with my usage of explanation points is on this page, I think he is referring to this sentence:

"Mommy! She started it! I have to fight back! I can't ever be bested by a girl! My penis will fall off!"

Now, if you read the entire passage of which that sentence is a part, instead of taking it out of context, you will see that I am making fun of the person it was directed to, who had sent me a snippy email. And if we remove the exclamation points, I do think that you will see that the sentence loses whatever meaning it has, and just becomes puzzling:

"Mommy. She started it. I have to fight back. I can't ever be bested by a girl. My penis will fall off."

I leave it up to you to decide whether or not my usage of exclamation points was overkill. In any case, on a page of some 1,237 words I used ten exclamation points. (I am not counting those used in the quoted material.) I can assure you that every exclamation point was put there deliberately, not out of some frantic need to express excitement -- or whatever it is Mr. Style Manual is worried about.

(By the way, it is... interesting that Mr. Style Manual uses that page of mine as an example, since I took the link off my main page some time ago, and the posts on my blog that referred to it have likewise scrolled off the main index page of my site. Do you have it bookmarked for some reason, Mr. Style Manual? Expecting to see something of your own show up there, or... has it already?)

jeebus, i didn't know you guys were so sensitive about this.

i'm not setting forth rules of style, i'm merely saying what i like and dislike.

and i do have it bookmarked, cause it makes me smile.

also, snicker.

Adam,

The action at your site must be pretty slow if you have the time to come here and whine about punctuation. You should fill in some of that free time by starting a petition or burning a flag, you know, something constructive.

YEAH!!! Really!!!!!!

Oops. Sorry.

"an exclamation point functions as the grammatical equivalent of a wink and a nudge, more or less bludgeoning the reader into accepting the writer's hilarity."

HAH! EXCLAMATION MARKS AS BRAINWASHING DEVICE!! ANOTHER VAST RIGHT WING CONSPIRACY?!!!
I've always thought they were used for marking exclamations.