Exclamation mark

[6][7][8] According to 21st-century literary scholar Florence Hazrat,[9] da Urbisaglia "felt very annoyed" that people were reading script with a flat tone, even when written to elicit emotions.

[21] This "bang" usage is behind the names of the interrobang, an unconventional typographic character, and the shebang, a feature of Unix computer systems.

In the printing world, the exclamation mark can be called a screamer, a gasper, a slammer, a dog's cock,[22] or a startler.

[23] In hacker culture, the exclamation mark is called "bang", "shriek", or, in the British slang known as Commonwealth Hackish, "pling".

Exclamation marks are occasionally placed mid-sentence with a function similar to a comma, for dramatic effect, although this usage is obsolete: "On the walk, oh!

One study suggests that, in addition to other uses, exclamation marks may also function as markers of friendly interaction, for example, by making "Hi!"

symbol (an exclamation mark within parentheses) implies that a character has made an obviously sarcastic comment e.g.: "Ooh, a sarcasm detector.

When available, a 'narrow no-break space' (espace fine insécable) is used between the last word and the exclamation mark in European French.

Cantonese has not historically used dedicated punctuation marks, rather relying on grammatical markers to denote the end of a statement.

[35] The Canton and Hong Kong regions, however, generally refused to accept the exclamation mark as it was seen as carrying with it unnecessary and confusing Western connotations; however, an exclamation mark, including in some written representations of colloquy in Cantonese, can be used informally to indicate strong feeling.

In Modern Greek, the exclamation mark (Θαυμαστικό, thavmastikó) has been introduced from Latin scripts and is used identically, although without the reluctance seen in English usage.

'), an interjection should only be separated from an extended exclamation by a comma (e.g., Ωχ, ξέχασα το μάτι της κουζίνας ανοιχτό!, Ōch, xéchasa to máti tīs kouzínas anoichtó!, 'Oops!

As in British English, a bracketed exclamation mark may be used to indicate irony or surprise at a statement: Dice que esta noche no va a salir de fiesta (!

It is further used in parentheses, (᥄), after a sentence or phrase to indicate irony or sarcasm: ᤖᤥᤂᤌ ᤔᤚᤗ ᤐᤤ ᤊᤇ ᤃᤦᤄ (᥄) (Rōkhatha maṡala pai yancha gaugha (!

[citation needed] In Khoisan languages, and the International Phonetic Alphabet, a symbol that looks like the exclamation mark is used as a letter to indicate the postalveolar click sound (represented as q in Zulu orthography).

Brands (parent of fast food chains like Taco Bell and KFC), Web services Yahoo!

It appears in the titles of stage and screen works, especially comedies and musicals; examples include the game show Jeopardy!

by programmers varies according to their background, though it was very common to give it a short name to make reading code aloud easier.

This negation principle has spread to ordinary language; for example, the word "!clue" is used as a synonym for "no-clue" or "clueless".

Early e-mail systems also used the exclamation mark as a separator character between hostnames for routing information, usually referred to as "bang path" notation.

In the IRC protocol, a user's nickname and ident are separated by an exclamation mark in the hostmask assigned to him or her by the server.

Acorn RISC OS uses filenames starting with pling to create an application directory: for instance a file called !Run is executed when the folder containing it is double-clicked (holding down shift prevents this).

In the Metal Gear and Paper Mario series, an exclamation mark appears over enemies' heads when they notice the player.

In massively multiplayer online (MMO) games such as World of Warcraft, an exclamation mark hovering over a character's head is often used to indicate that they are offering a quest for the player to complete.

In Dota 2, an exclamation mark is shown above the head of a unit if it is killed by means not granting enemies experience or gold (if it is "denied").

For a short period Stan Lee, as editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics, attempted to curb their overuse by a short-lived ban on exclamation points altogether, which led to an inadvertent lack of ending punctuation on many sentences.

at the Disco dropped the exclamation point in its name; this became the "most-discussed topic on [fan] message boards around the world".

American musician Pink stylizes her stage name "P!NK",[67] and uses three exclamation points in the subtitle of her 2010 release, Greatest Hits...

The exclamation mark was later the subject of a bitter argument between Elaine Benes and her boyfriend, Jake Jarmel, in the Seinfeld episode, "The Sniffing Accountant".

Jake took extreme exception to the trivial criticism and broke up with Elaine, putting an exclamation mark after his parting words: "I'm leaving!