I confess, I have recently been getting a kick out of deliberately replying to emails from people who don’t use exclamation marks without using any in return, rather than using one every other sentence, as is my usual practice for professional correspondence. At first, it felt stiff—was I now a cold-blooded crone?—but after a while, I started enjoying how it seemed to increase my gravitas. After all, why should I tolerate an inequitable distribution of the typographical emotional labor?
Passive-aggressively omitting exclamation marks at people is a new one on me.
