Though not normally known for its sense of humor, Foreign Policy magazine (intentionally?) has a funny piece explaining some recently coined (and serious) acronyms, the kind of words Henry Kissinger, Madeline Albright, and Hillary Clinton toss around at Georgetown cocktail parties in between bites of mini quiche and bon mots about the goings on in Montenegro and Bhutan, including SOFA, RINGO, BINGO, GONGO, and the best of all, PIIGS (which has nothing to do with swine flu). Okay... PIIGS: Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain - countries literally at the periphery of Europe all suffering from an economic downtown.
Stuart Jeffries of The Guardian thinks the exclamation point is coming back into style! Really! He does! Sure, Jeffries refers to F. Scott Fitzgerald, who said "An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own joke" and Terry Pratchett's Maskerade, in which a character says, "And all those exclamation marks, you notice? Five? A sure sign of someone who wears his underpants on his head," but Jeffries is no slouch. He also notes an academic paper titled "Gender and the Use of Exclamation Points in Computer-Mediated Communication" in his discussion. Are exclamation marks meant to denote happiness? giddiness? irony? sarcasm? "How lovely it would be," he writes, "if we could recapture that original, pre-ironic wonder that made writers slip the o under the I! "
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