,,.?/:;_-!!!! - Part 1

This one is going to be a lazy blog - the kind where someone else has done most of the the writing for you...

The very few people who bother to go through my random thoughts would know that words fascinate me. The very power of a right word at the right time has won hearts and wars. Note what was said of Winston Churchill, who won the Second World War for Britain against overwhelming odds just by the power of words: "Churchill mobilised the English language, and sent it into battle" !

Equally fascinating as words, are the pauses which punctuate them. We have known and read about so many sentences which mean something totally different when punctuation marks are used differently, most fascinatingly dealt with in Lynn Truss' Eats, Shoots and Leaves: Why, Commas Do Make a Difference.

I came across this article today by Steve Macone, which talks about 'exclamation points' and is absolutely brilliant. So, read on!!! :


Too many exclamation points!!!

                        

HEY STEVE!” someone recently emailed me. Both my name and “Hey” were in caps, and all five sentences in the message ended with exclamation points. At first glance I assumed the message was a loved one writing from a plane that was going down. It turned out to be someone I barely knew, discussing minor logistics and thanking me for something that had taken no effort on my part.
I’m not the first to point out that we’re in a punctuation arms race in emails and texts. “Thank you!!” people reply, like you just sent them a kidney instead of an invoice.
“See you at 1:00 for the meeting,” I type, and then hesitate: If I don’t add an exclamation point it sounds like I plan to kill the person when I get there. And yet when someone emails me about a meeting with an exclamation point, I think, “Listen, it’s a meeting. The best it could go is that there are bagels. If you are really that excited about it, you’re a psycho.”
But I admit: I do it too. I’ll drop an exclamation point or nine in an email or text to smooth the transaction. I do it not because I’m nice but because I’m lazy: Instead of finding the right words I find the “Shift” and the “1″ keys. Synthetic excitement explodes out of my cursor, unearned. And I can sound friendly without all the effort of actually being friendly.
But I’ve also come to hate it. I hate that I’m trapped by it, that if I don’t put six exclamation points in an email or text I sound like a jaded ex-bullfighter or a 13-year-old goth girl.
We communicate electronically now, and that has its own art form: How long to wait before answering our boss to convey that we’re on top of things yet also busy. Whether to use emoticons or not. Whether to use proper capitalization or not. Deciding whether or not to reply all by scrolling through the list of recipients and making snap judgments about them. Those people who reply to your emails by typing their responses within the email you sent, their answers ripping through your email with a different shade of text like they’re the Voice of God. The sweet, definitive clack of hitting send on a nice 10:30 a.m. burn to a college buddy in a chain of email banter, picturing faces curling into smirks at the desks of jobs that keep them serious otherwise. The sting of your buddy’s reply. The snug buzzing of a text against your thigh, with the quick calculation of who it probably is based on recent response time patterns.

Exclamation points are part of all this. They set the tone of these transactions that are intimate, beamed into our pockets, flicked into our inboxes, and yet still not face-to-face. And when used too much they come off like punctuation with a motive, a little plea to be liked. Or like tiny specks of implanted networking. If it were all a party, the periods would be by the bar, drinking whiskeys and politely discussing the price of daycare, the commas chiming in at just the right moment, while the exclamation points pretend to dance, nodding furiously at anything anyone says, smiling so hard their eyes look crazy, taking way too many photos, teetering on their impractical shoes — tiny dots under those tall frames, fitting: excitement’s such an unsteady emotion compared to the loyalty of regret or the militia-like reliability of anger— spilling their Red Bull and vodkas, and claiming to have the time of their lives.
The problem is that life is not a party. Have you looked at life lately? It’s not that exciting. It consists mostly of showering and trying not to trip. The period is calibrated to suffice most of the time. So I’m left wondering why we’re typing so breathlessly, like we’re all skydiving into prom.
The answer, of course, is because we want life to be exciting. And we want to be friendly.
But exclamation points give it all away too soon. They short some social circuit. They make us seem needy and insecure, which of course we all are. That’s why we communicate to begin with, right? We need that invoice, please, need to follow up and confirm that meeting for 1 o’clock, need to check with a friend that they’re going to the awesome party! — the party we’re actually nervous about attending, where we’ll try to fit in by half-dancing and nodding and drinking a fun energy drink cocktail, and smiling harder than normal in the hopes that people like us.
I realized I was sprinkling exclamation points in emails and texts as a kind of hedge against the chance that the person on the other end wouldn’t like me. I realized I was being annoying: When the macro seeps into the micro — when our hopes and dreams start showing up in emails about sponges in the break room — it’s called melodrama. So lately I’ll type an exclamation point, pause, and then delete it. And just hope that when I do get to the meeting they’ll be pleasantly surprised that I don’t plan to kill them, that they just might like me, period.

Time. Please.

They are called Kanwarias. Every year around this time, you can see them - determinely plodding, with their heads down, along the highways of Delhi and Gurgaon. They go to Hardwar I am told, to the holy Ganges. Dressed in saffron, with a strange contraption slung on their shoulders. When I first saw them, they intrigued me - an unending stream of saffron in single file, like ants marching on. Now, however, what intrigues me is the fact that they seem to be doing this march more often, and with increasing frequency.

The same is true of my weekly magazine buying: every Saturday, I go over to this guy in Delhi to buy our vast and varied quota of weeklies, fortnightlies and monthlies. There was a time I looked forward to it. Now I do not need to - Saturday is upon me, before I know. The same is true of my monthly visit to the Gurudwara every 16th of the month, to bow my head to God and to the person I loved the most in life. The 16th of every month comes up very rapidly now - like a giant prayerwheel with dates written on it, but just spinning faster and faster...

I thought it was just me who felt that way - this quickening frequency of events, the shortening of hours and days between occurences. But I find I am not alone - everyone I talk to feels that way. They feel that stuff is happening faster, the duration between events of all kinds is shortening every year they live, the hands of the clock have hastened.

Time, if it may, is accelerating.

And that is what I have come to strongly believe - time is accelerating. While a day is still 24 hours, and not 23, the 24 just happen faster. The hour is still 60 minutes, and the minute is still 60 seconds. But just that each second is ticking just infinitesimaly faster, every time it ticks. And, again as if to validate me, everyone I tell this to agrees with me - first a little hesitantly, but then with complete conviction. Of course, they say, that is it, that explains everything - time is accelerating.

But, can time do that? Perhaps it can. What is time, after all? It started for us a millionth of a nano second after the Big Bang. And the Big Bang was the event where a single point, or Singularity, exploded out to form the known universe. Imagine that explosion - a trillion planets pushing out from that point, accelerating as they go outwards and onwards, creating our universe. And the universe is still expanding, and perhaps at an accelerating rate - in the bargain, it accelerates time..

Or perhaps the explanation is more prosaic. Every day we live, there are more and more things created to fill up our day. Even in my lifetime, my day 20 years back had only so many things to fill it - three meals, 1 hour of television, 7 hours of school, 1 hour of reading, perhaps an hour of playing and friends. Think of the day now - 10 hours of work, 2 hours of commuting, 2 hours of making things work at home, 24x7x500 hours of television, a billion online videos, 200 real friends, 500 friends on Facebook,  1500 colleagues on linkedin, 150 mails, 50 SMSes, 400 tweets... the list is endless. And before, we can deal with even a tenth of them, the day is over!

Or is it something else? Are our cells aging faster, perhaps? Or perhaps the Higgs Boson explains this - little massless particles of time hurtling away, faster and faster. Or is our planet on its final accleration - like the last gasp sprint of a long distance runner -, as it rushes to hurtle off the cliff its denizens are rapidly and relentlessly pushing it off?

If I was a physicist, I would have loved to model this - create an elegant little equation which explains this whole concept of acceleration of time. Perhaps it would win me the Nobel. Talking of which, I believe that the results of this years Nobels are going to be out very soon. Had they not just given last year's awards?

Addition: Thanks Rajnish. This is a great video to accompany the blog