278 - An Admirable Point - Florence Hazrat
You Are Not So Smart
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The Origin and Purpose of the Exclamation Mark
The exclamation mark's origin and purpose date back to a scholar in Italy who felt the need for a sign to differentiate exclamations from statements or questions. This scholar, a lawyer and humanist, observed that people were misinterpreting exclamations and wrote a treatise on punctuation to address this issue. He proposed a new sign to indicate emphasis, which eventually became the exclamation mark.
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