When we were kids, my brother

and I used to read comic books to each other to make fun of the devices

used to express excitement, like Superman fighting off the bad guys.

Every other cartoon frame was

filled with words like POW!! BANG!! KER-BOOM!! CRASH!! in gigantic jagged

letters, with lightning flashes for emphasis.

We were big into drollery and

thought it was hilarious to read in dull, flat voices, utterly devoid

of emotion: "oh. oh. look. it's a bird. it's a plane. it's su-per-man.

he's going to throw that lo-co-mo-tive at us. bang. pow. crash."

And then we'd just roll on the floor laughing at ourselves.

All right, so we led dull lives

in those pre-television days.

Or maybe we were intuiting

what more experienced lexiphiles already knew, that exclamation marks

have an honored place in comic books, but virtually nowhere else. As one

critic pointed out, "Reading the adventures of superheroes just wouldn't

be the same without huge sound effects spilling off the page, pummeling

our senses in bright colors, many topped off with enormous exclamation

points."

I was in a college journalism class before I learned that editors purely

hate exclamation points. At least, the editors of the better newspapers.

Take a look at the supermarket tabloids, and you'll find exclamation points

aplenty screaming for your attention: "Dinosaur Resuscitated, Devours

Kindergarten!!"

At first I thought editors

were just stodgy old fogies, but the more I read and learned to critique,

I came to agree that copy loaded with !!! looks pretty amateurish.

In fact, in Richard Dowis and

Richard Lederer's little guidebook on writing, "The Write Way,"

they say exactly that: "This mark is much beloved of high school

sophomores."

A newspaper man still squirms

when he remembers a journalism professor reading over his shoulder. "You

used an exclamation point in this story," said the prof, pointing

to the offensive punctuation and glaring over the top of his spectacles.

"People who get paid to write do not use exclamation points."

Punctuation itself reaches