The not so humble exclamation mark

Two great articles about the growing use and abuse of punctuation in texts and emails:

Before the 1970s, few manual typewriters were equipped with an exclamation mark key. Instead, if you wanted to express your unbridled joy at – ooh, I don’t know – the budding loveliness of an early spring morning and gild the lily of your purple prose with an upbeat startler, you would have to type a full stop, then back space, push the shift key and type an apostrophe. Which is enough to take the joie de vivre out of anyone’s literary style.

Stuart Jeffries on the revival of the exclamation mark | Books | The Guardian

What happened to “Dear Sir”, “Yours faithfully” and the bracing pleasures of a firm handshake? I ask. They died, you reply, but nobody bothered to tell you, granddad.

Stuart Jeffries laments the rise of bogus email intimacy | Technology | The Guardian.