Tuesday, March 10, 2009

The Inclamation Point

Today my Bioinformatics professor related his latest insight to us during lab:
While we have punctuation that allows us to express enthusiasm or emphasis, such as the exclamation point, the recent rise in use of "emoticons" is a cop-out way to express emotions not available to us with the use of traditional punctuation.

We can just draw a little face instead of having a meaningful mark...and he thinks this is unsatisfactory. His answer to this problem: the inclamation point. When you'd rather express the opposite of excitement, use the inclamation point, which is denoted by an i (sort of looks like an upside down exclamation point, but not like Spanish uses). Also, since it's not an exciting punctuation mark, it should follow a period. Apparently.

For example:
My lab went an extra 2 hours long today.i

The added bonus: this can be pronounced "ih," which to my mind is a pretty indifferent sort of sound. :)

Just another fun from the Hill.

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