Sometimes I write emails that freak me out. They’re peppered with chummy slang like hey guys, shot up with exclamation points, and everything is great! and terrific! and focused on having a great weekend and . . . I’m a 32-year-old man writing like a teenage girl. How did this happen?

At moments like this, my mind flashes on The Elements of Style and I pine for the dignified correspondence of Hemingway and Cheever. I vow to grow up and amend my ways. The next time a client writes, I respond with Dear Agnes and close with a simple Sincerely. But this sounds litigious, even funereal. We read between the lines these days and, in a 140-character culture of breakneck brevity, something as innocuous as a neutral valediction or a simple ellipsis can be fraught with meaning, potentially expressing the writer’s ambivalence, hesitation, or a more pointed message: we need to talk...

Candy Chang says we ought to create a new punctuation mark that splits the difference between a period and an exclamation point. Many people sense this and, caught in a trap, defer to the friendly exclamation point — it’s a reasonable impulse, but in the real world there’s a distinct line between professional enthusiasm and unhinged exuberance, and I worry that it’s getting smudged at the expense of my maturity.

I fretted about my email syntax for quite some time in this vein before realizing that I was looking at it from the wrong end. I should focus on my response as a reader rather than a writer — and the truth is that I like receiving emails stuffed with comfy slang, superlatives, and exclamation points. They feel good great!

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AN-2 – Messenger
from On-Air. Was Not Was, 2007  | buy it
The music of Andrei A. Zakharov immediately reminds you that the word ’synthesizer’ is tried to ’synthetic’. Plastic chords, chimes and lasers swirl across sugar-rush bass melodies and the chintz factor is so beautifully and knowingly deployed that you can’t help but grin. Sort of like an exclamation point.