GrodsCorp

Exclaim!

Wednesday 26 March 2008, 3:10 pm

The Editor

Categories: Literature, Science

Tags: ExclamationMarks, physics, PopularScience

I love reading popular science books about physics, chaos theory, string theory and all that sort of stuff. I’m not very smart in these areas but I know just enough to be dangerous and love the Dummies Guide To-style explanations that these books provide.

Since it’s school holidays and I have both the time and energy to read for pleasure I’m currently working my way through Atom by Lawrence M. Krauss. Something that I’ve noticed in Atom and previously in other similar books is the authors’ love of a good exclamation mark! I mean, they sometimes cram two or three into a single paragraph! If somebody had the time and the inclination they could do a study into the ratio of exclamation marks to full stops in popular science books versus non-popular science books. Wouldn’t that be a riveting research project?

Here are a couple of choice exclamation mark samples from Atom.

At a certain point, if it collapses by a factor of 50 in size, then the density will have increased by a factor of 125,000!

The number of collisions of the atoms in this volume of air during the 4-billion-year history of life on Earth is about 10^45, about 10 billion times smaller still!

Current estimates in supersymmetric models are in the range from 10^34 to 10^35 years, well beyond the current limits!

I’ve decided that the exclamation mark in popular science books is like the laugh track in American sitcoms. The laugh track tells you when to laugh because it’s usually not obvious that the “joke” is meant to be funny, and the exclamation mark tells you when to be amazed because the scales are so small or large that it’s sometimes not obvious that the subject of the sentence is amazing.

12 Comments

Ant Rogenous (Wednesday 26 March 2008, 3:18 pm) #

Just like the way mathematicians tried to sex up factorials by using ! to denote them. Shameless.
Bron (Wednesday 26 March 2008, 3:39 pm) #

Oh my God! Incredible!
Zombie Mao (Wednesday 26 March 2008, 4:35 pm) #

what! only! two! or! three! exclamation! points! in! a! paragraph!!!!

They! are! not! trying! hard! enough!!!!!!!!!!!!
Bridgit Gread (Wednesday 26 March 2008, 4:38 pm) #

Some are more appreciative of the humble semi-colon…

Do these writers do the thing that I absolutely hate (!) and put exclamation points in parantheses, for no reason whatsoever?
Damian (Wednesday 26 March 2008, 4:49 pm) #

Exclamation marks; the laugh track (!!) of science writing?
magic bellybutton (Wednesday 26 March 2008, 6:27 pm) #

Just like the way my accounting reading for uni the other day tells you 10 pages into a 37 page chapter about nothing but historical assets (quite possibly THE most boring subject in the world*), “See, the study of accounting does raise some interesting issues!”

Yep, complete with exclamation point. Extra excitement for that, obvs.

* and I’m saying this as someone who WANTS to become an accountant. Oh sorry, !!!!!!!!!!!
Bron (Thursday 27 March 2008, 9:07 am) #

I was catching up with a friend last night, and I told her about this blog (so if she pops in, HI Miss M!) (that exclamation mark is justified), and she reminded me about my loathing of a mutual friend’s habit of every single sentence with ellipses… And she is right, I loathe it… It’s just so bloody annoying… What’s wrong with a single full stop?…

See, it’s annoying, isn’t it?… Seriously, I’ve been known to go as far as suggesting that I’ll dump this person as a friend because of her annoying habit… (but that was only to illuminate the depth of my loathing for her &$^#%! stupid ellipses…)
Wah (Thursday 27 March 2008, 12:22 pm) #

This is far too clever for Grods. We are people of words for whom numbers become baffling when not used in the context of ordering drinks.

The fact that this post has so far attracted 7 replies and anything with Fleshlights averages around 23 replies sadly proves this.

Fuckin’ atoms.
Bron (Thursday 27 March 2008, 12:52 pm) #

You have a point, Wah. One day, after bitching and moaning (again) about aforementioned person’s irritates-me-to-shits habit of ending every sentence with ellipses to yet another friend (fuck, I’m popular), she asked of me quickly during the briefest of pauses during my tirade, “But isn’t an ellispes a moon thing when the sun passes over it or something?”
Wah (Friday 28 March 2008, 7:21 am) #

Bron, did you smash a glass into her face?
The Editor (Friday 28 March 2008, 7:47 am) #

I reckon you could get off the GBH charge in this case by pleading temporary insanity.
Bron (Friday 28 March 2008, 9:19 am) #

Wah, no, I was too dumbfounded to continue my rant. My mouth hung open for several minutes. I think I might have drooled a little too, such was my inability to mobilise any part of my body.

Shock is a terrible thing to happen to anyone.