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March 9, 2007

Strange But True!

Q. If there's an overworked, amateurish punctuation mark in English, there's general agreement as to what it might be. It's not a , ; ? or . Hey, good guess!

A. The exclamation point should be used the way responsible motorists use their horn: only as a last resort, says Mark Davidson in “Right, Wrong, and Risky: A Dictionary of Today's American English Usage.”


 
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