Mary Ann or Ginger

The girl next door or the voluptuous vamp? Cutesy or sexy? Short shorts or low-cut top? Exclamation point or question mark?

Through my punctuation-colored glasses, that’s how I see the Gilligan Island ladies. Mary Ann reminds me of the perky, straight-forward exclamation point and Ginger of the curvy, mysterious question mark.

How do you like your ladies and punctuation marks? Enthusiastic or elusive? Frisky or seductive?

It’s a tough one. I used to sway more Mary Ann when I was a kid, but as an adult, I can’t help but be seduced by Ginger’s beauty.

I am equally as torn over the punctuation marks.

I appreciate a good exclamation:

I’ve got tiger’s blood and Adonis DNA!

But I do also love myself a good question:

What the hell will Charlie Sheen say next?

So, instead of focusing on the differences, let’s focus on similarities.

Can we agree that both Mary Ann and Ginger are lovely women who displayed phenomenal foresight when they overpacked for a three hour excursion?

And did you know that both the question mark and exclamation point go inside the quotation marks when they apply to the quote, but outside the quotation marks when they apply to the actual sentence?

Here, I’ll show you.

In the following sentence, the quotation is a question, so the question mark goes inside:

I asked my friend, “Who do you like better, Gilligan or The Professor?”

And it’s the same with the exclamation point:

She said, "The Professor is so hot!"

In this sentence, the whole sentence is a question, so the question mark goes on the outside:

Didn't you love it when The Professor said brainy things like, "It was a geological phenomenon caused by volcanic activity beneath the Earth's surface resulting into concentration of heat at a specific location"?

And look- it’s the same with the exclamation point when the whole sentence is an exclamation:

I do like the part about "concentration of heat at a specific location"!

Cheap Thrills

Yesterday, I was trying to purchase a drink from a vending machine. I slid my relatively crisp dollar bill into the slot, and, as I am sure we have all experienced, it spit the dollar right back out at me. I smoothed the dollar out and tried it again, but again the machine spit it back out. After the second rejection, this thought actually went through my mind: “In this economy, the vending machine shouldn’t be so picky.”

Although the bad economy has affected some of us far more severely than others, I think it’s safe to say that the economy has had an effect on most of our psyches.

To cope, we’ve been embracing relatively cheap diversions that make us feel good. According to the Huffington Post, the following industries have experienced a spike: family movies, donuts, fireworks and gum.

It makes sense. Nothing on the list costs too much (especially if you sneak the donuts into the theater instead of buying a $10.00 bag of popcorn), and each product either makes us feel good or gives us a little spark of excitement.

Well, I would like to propose an addition to the list of cheap thrills: exclamation points.

Every time I read about exclamation points in a grammar book, the author warns us not overuse them. And, under healthy economic conditions, I totally agree with that. But, while everything else is so dreary, why not make writing feel more exciting?

Exclamation marks are like punctuation fireworks.

They’re fun! They’re cute!! They’re exciting!!! They’re free!!!!!!!!

And I promise that when the economy has recovered, I will do my part in reinstating exclamation point limitations. After I have returned from my Mediterranean holiday on my yacht, of course.

What cheap thrills have helped you through the recession?

American Excess

"We met at Starbucks. Not at the same Starbucks but we saw each other at different Starbucks across the street from each other." Best in Show

Americans are known for many things; moderation is not one of them. We've got a Starbucks on every corner serving coffees the size of a large child. We drink 44 oz. sodas, and the club sandwich is an American staple: two layers of fillings between three slices of bread.

It is so hard for us to eat a moderate, healthy serving size of pasta or limit ourselves to a few fries that we have resorted to extreme measures: banning carbs. Well, it's not an official ban yet, like Prohibition, but we have attached such a stigma to carbs that people are shamed into ordering hamburgers without buns, drinking Michelob Ultra, and when I was a waitress, a customer actually asked me to substitute the potatoes for a salad because he was "allergic to carbs."

Due to lack of moderation, a stigma has similarly become attached to the exclamation point. We Americans have such a hard time limiting our exclamation point usage to one, even two, per sentence that now you can't read a grammar book's lesson on exclamation points without being warned to avoid overusing them.

So, if you don't trust yourself to moderate your exclamation point use, how do you provide emphasis in your writing?

Well, you can use a dash. It's not an exact substitution. It's more like swapping Hillary's decolletage for Meryl's.

By that, I mean that the dash doesn't provide quite the same level of emphasis, but it does provide some.

For example,

Hillary's neckline is low- really low.

The dash emphasizes the words really low.

And, we can also do something with the dash that we can’t do with an exclamation point: we can emphasize something mid-sentence:

Hillary's dress- the one that plunges all the way down to her belly button- seems so unlike her.

In this example, we are emphasizing the one that plunges all the way down to her belly button.

Or, instead of using the dash, you can just be brazen like these young ladies and screw any notion of moderation. Holly Madison went with three exclamation points and all caps:

Kelly went with five o's and nine exclamation points (although, it would have been nice if she sacrificed one of those exclamation points for an apostrophe for Im.)

And check out Audrina: three n's, four h's, three exclamation points- and even a sad face.

Try pronouncing annnd. It's a little hard on the throat.