Beware!!!

‘The trade deal USMCA has received fantastic reviews. It will go down as one of the best ever made, and it will also benefit Mexico and Canada!’

These are the words of Donald Trump, not tweeted, not spoken, but written down on the headed notepaper of the White House and finished off with an exclamation mark (or exclamation point, as he would call it, being of the American persuasion). The punctuation is rather mysterious and I think it has one of four possible meanings.

First, I should probably say what an exclamation mark is. The question is more vexed than you think.

Most authorities on English style despise exclamation marks. The Economist Style Guide and Gower’s The Complete Plain Words don’t even acknowledge its existence. The guides of the Times and the Guardian limit themselves to three words each: ‘Nearly always unnecessary’ and ‘Do not use’. They treat poor ! like the drunk man at a funeral, in the vain hope that he will go away.

Fowler at least gazed upon the gorgon and announced that an exclamation mark was all right so long as you were writing something which was actually, technically, grammatically an exclamation. This is a phrase usually beginning with the word How, as in ‘How terrible art thou in thy works!’, ‘How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!’, or ‘How sweet of you!’ None of these are questions (although it’s rather fun to read them that way). You can also have a shorter exclamatory phrase such as ‘Ye gods!’ or ‘Bollocks!’

That’s the technical rule. But there are two ways of looking at punctuation: technical and expressive. In the technical view a sentence is a lovely little Swiss watch and the punctuation makes up the cogs connecting the parts.