On 16 August, news of the separation between Britney Spears and her husband Sam Asghari rocked the world of the popstar’s millions of devotees. After just a year of marriage and freedom from that infamous paternal conservatorship, Britney’s private unhappiness makes the headlines yet again. After days of resolute silence, the singer takes to Instagram to get in touch with her fans:
Sadly, many suspicious Britneians had seen it coming a long time ago; Persian posterboy Asghari seemed too good to be true - and he was. (Having Persian blood, I’m allowed to say that!) After just about 14 months of marriage, he’s filing for divorce, and contesting the prenup. Meanwhile, Spears shows herself chipper on social media, peppering her post with lavish punctuation. Let’s have a look, and see what we can deduce!
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There are eleven sets of triple exclamation marks (that’s a lot for a short post!!!) and three points of suspense (the dot dot dot, trailing off into the distance…). It would be unkind to make assumptions about the singer’s mental state based on flak against ! by grammarians and writers like Terry Prachett who alleged someone who uses too many exclamation marks might be wearing their underpants on their head. While this might be true for the likes of Trump who, when he was still allowed on the playground, gave punctuation enfant terrible vibes by dumping 33.000 exclamation marks into 57.000 posts in the twelve years of his Twitter, I mean “X”, fun ride — but it’s not true for Britney. In fact, in spite of the !!! bonanza, she’s minding her dots and dashes. And gaps, too! A bit too much even.
We’ve got some gramatically correct commas (for example between the subordinate “if” clause, and main clause), we’ve got rhetorically effective dot dot dots, creating suspense at the beginning, we’ve got apostrophes, capitalisation… the only mark we don’t have is the full stop. Instead, exclamation mark triplets take over the full stop’s task of ending an utterance. That’s certainly a tad much, but we might chalk it up to predictive texting. Once you type !!! a bit too often, the system will probably jump to the three marks automatically, and few of us will go back and edit manually if we’re in a rush.
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What I find more interesting than the number of !!! is the space before and after the marks. It’s common practice to insert a blank space after the mark in English punctuation, but certainly not before a final ! or ? or . or mid-sentence : or ; or , leaving only - and ( and … accommodating of a pre-punctuation space : like , get what I mean ?
So if you see too much air around some punctuation marks, it’s because the person’s smartphone automatically offers punctuation, adding blanks of its own accord, because it treats marks like letters in need of breathing space. Or they’re just French. In France, you wrap emptiness around all and every punctuation mark, including those infamously français « guillemets », or double inverted quotation marks or, if you insist on punctuation-speak, sideways double chevrons.
What’s considered de rigueur in French, is a no-no in English and German. German, in fact, hates the space before punctuation so much that it invented its own word for it: plenken. Not to be mistaken with 2011 internet-sensation planking, memorably mocked in The Office. Riffing on the English “blank”, early-internet pioneer Johannes Leckebusch came up with the word in the late 1980s, but 30 years later, some still hadn’t got the memo.
German wouldn’t be German if it didn’t also follow suit with the opposite of plenken, that is, klempen when two words clamp around a poor suffocating punctuation mark.
Perhaps, Britney Spears was just reminding us of the different typographical habits around negative space? Perhaps, she’s making an accusatory ironic statement about the prejudice against women adding exclamation marks to their online writing? And perhaps, !!! is simply a testament to pain and heart-ache, and their textual relief after all, and nothing more.
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American contemporary artist Richard Artschwager was fascinated by the exclamation mark, creating outsized statues of it, and calling ! the ‘prince of punctuation’. He saw it as ‘spiralling free but gravity-aware…hopping on one foot.’ And so, accompanying her social media post is one of Spear’s signature defiant and sexy dance video. Gyrating herself free. Just dance!