The exclamation point doesn’t mean what you think it does anymore. At The Huffington Post, Maddie Crum explores the punctuation mark’s changing and increasingly gendered usage: instead of conveying strong emotion, the mark now connotes levity, and apparently women are far more likely to use it than men.
All the Exclaiming Ladies
Claire Burgess
Claire Burgess’s short fiction has appeared in Third Coast, Hunger Mountain, and PANK online, among others. Her stories have received special mentions in the Pushcart Prize and Best American anthologies, but haven’t actually made it into one yet. She’s a graduate of the Vanderbilt University MFA program, where she co-founded Nashville Review. She lives in Pittsburgh by way of the deep South and says things on Twitter @Clairabou_.