Let's hope an exclamation mark is enough to save Geoff Hoon!, by Craig Brown
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion
The exclamation mark - or "screamer", as it is sometimes called by journalists - is often derided as the most brash and vulgar of punctuation marks.
Sophisticated people have always tended to pooh-pooh the exclamation mark. They sense something populist and vulgar about it, pointing to all those brash musicals - Oliver!, Mamma Mia!, Oh! Calcutta! Apparently, when it was still on its initial out-of-town tour, the musical Oklahoma was in grave danger of flopping; only after the producers decided to pop on an exclamation mark - Oklahoma! - did the theatres began to fill.
Scott Fitzgerald said that using an exclamation mark is like laughing at one of your own jokes.
Lynn Truss: Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
...it shouts, flashes like neon, and jumps up and down. In the family of punctuation where the full stop is daddy and the comma is mummy, and the semicolon quietly practises the piano with crossed hands, the exclamation mark is the big attention-deficit brother who gets over-excited and breaks things and laughs too loudly.
