938. Love it or hate it, the exclamation point has been on the red carpet lately because we're using it more. But it also has a fascinating history: the man who invented it was trying to fix a problem that annoyed him. This interview with Florence Hazrat is bursting with fascinating tidbits.
938. Love it or hate it, the exclamation point has been on the red carpet lately because we're using it more. But it also has a fascinating history: the man who invented it was trying to fix a problem that annoyed him. This interview with Florence Hazrat is bursting with fascinating tidbits.
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MIGNON FOGARTY
Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and today I'm here with Dr. Florence Hazrat, author of this amazing book, "An Admirable Point" all about the exclamation mark … or the exclamation point. We'll get into that! Can you imagine a whole book about the exclamation point? I loved it, and I just can't wait to talk to her about it today.
Welcome, Florence.
FLORENCE HAZRAT
Hi, Mignon. It's so great to talk to you today.
MIGNON FOGARTY
Yes. And you're coming to us all the way from Berlin too, so thank you for doing that on the strange, um, time zones we're doing here. I guess before we … I really wanna talk about the history of the punctuation mark, but maybe just a tiny bit before that, what compelled you to write an entire book about the exclamation point?
FLORENCE HAZRAT
Well, I think I can actually write a second book because it's just the gift that keeps on giving. And actually I'm writing a whole sort of social history of punctuation at the moment. I was at university, I was researching brackets in Renaissance, uh, romance, so that's texts about knights traveling into forests, being distracted by their main quest and going elsewhere.
And I realized that all of those sort of digressive narratives had lots and lots of parentheses, and I was wondering where do they actually come from? So I was looking at that, and then I started to look at other kinds of punctuation, and it just became this, this beast as it, you know, we go through, we go down rabbit holes and so I sort of came across a lot of negative press on the exclamation mark or the exclamation point. And I thought, well, that really can't be the whole story. There must be a reason why we're using it, why we have invented it, and why we still have it. Because as you know, usually if we don't need anything anymore, we just discard it.
And, I just couldn't find the defense of the exclamation mark. And so I thought, well, okay, then I guess I have to sort of write an apology or like a manifesto for this neglected mark.
MIGNON FOGARTY
Amazing. And so just thinking about it, did the punctuation, did the exclamation mark come before or after parentheses or brackets? Because I know they didn't all emerge at the same time.
FLORENCE HAZRAT
That's right. So the exclamation mark came just a little bit before the parentheses and other kind quick cognitive marks, such as the semicolon, or the dash, or the hyphen, or the dot, dot, dot, which are all about performance in a way. But they're sort of about thinking and about hesitating or adding something else, and I love that too.
But the exclamation mark is really the first one. And perhaps, on a very obvious level, the only one that introduces emotion. So perhaps I can talk a little bit about exactly where it came from. In the middle of the 14th century, there was an Italian scholar, a humanist. So at the time people were very interested in Latin, and classical Latin, and elegant texts, and kind of going back, if possible, finding early manuscripts, that were close to kind of the Latin of Cicero and Quintilian and so on. And one such scholar felt kinda annoyed that people were pronouncing sort of expressions of emotion or admiration as he said, in the same way as questions or statements. Because the question mark had been around just for a couple of hundred years before that and he said, okay, I think we need a mark to notify us that our voice needs to change here.
It's an admiration, as he said, or some kind of wonder is happening in the sentence. It wasn't quite yet emotion. So that's kind of coming in. It takes a little bit of time until the exclamation mark attaches itself to any kind of emotion. At the beginning it's kind of supposed to be for wonder and admiration.
And so this scholar Alpoleio da Urbisaglia says, I think we need a sign for that. So we know how to tune our voice, and we know what's coming. And he says, we need to put a little dot and an apostrophe just dangling from the side. And the curious kind of thing is that he doesn't actually make that shape in his treatise on punctuation.
And for some reason or other though, that treatise was circulating in manuscript. And another punctuation fan picked that up called Coluccio Salutati 50 years later in 1399, he writes a manuscript. It's sort of a humorous defense of law against medicine: which is the better discipline? And he uses the mark for the first time, and he actually is also the inventor of parentheses, and both of those marks he puts into the manuscript of his secretary by hand.
So that's like a really big deal that this big scholar was putting all of those minute marks and kind of minute traffic signs of the text by hand. So that was really important for people. That started to become really important for people. How can I manipulate my text in a way that really is very effective and has this rhetorical effect?
MIGNON FOGARTY
That's so interesting. One of my followers named Jonathan asked a question that's kind of related because it's interesting that the exclamation point, exclamation mark, was invented to help us think about how to make sounds, and he, Jonathan, wanted to know what you think about punctuation in general and how it's used online to indicate not so much grammar, but how things should sound, or the rhythm of something, or even sarcasm.
So do you see that as sort of the natural evolution from the original exclamation point, or is it sort of a new development and a whole different thing?
FLORENCE HAZRAT
No, that's a really great question. And for sure, I think as you say, that's something that people have been occupied with for a very long time. How do we translate ourselves into text? And in the past, text was a kind of disembodiment from the person, right? And you send a letter and you know that's not you, but that's your voice that you capture in words. And online, I think the disembodiment become double because we don't have handwriting anymore. We don't have paper that's crumpled or folded or that took a journey or something. So it's really just, in a way, it's just symbols, and it doesn't have anything of the body left. So I think punctuation has always been a way of putting the body back into something that's potentially quite flat and that where there's a lot of potential for miscommunication, as we know, even words, you know, we struggle to express or translate our feelings into words. So, and that becomes at so many removes. Then once we write and once we go online. So for sure, I think that's really a nice kind of bridge that people have always been occupied with, “How can I represent myself, my voice?” For example, “How can I tell the other person how to read my text?” and punctuation marks would be seen as orchestrating the flow of a sentence. For example, “when do we breathe? Where's the grammar finished? Where do the eyes sort of linger?” And they have actually been eye tracking studies that eyes linger at the comma, for example.
And then they, there's a little pause, but then the rest of the words can be processed more quickly. So punctuation is really something that goes into us. Or for example, exclamation marks can be … we can sort of … our throat is moving silently as we read. So if we read something that's exclaimed, our vocal chords kind of quiver in a different way.
And those are all my things that a computer will be able to pick up. And we don't notice that, but I want to believe that somehow subconsciously our bodies do notice that. So yeah, I think that punctuation online is probably another way of trying to get into and trying to get back into this kind of face-to-face communication that we're just replacing through writing.
MIGNON FOGARTY
That's amazing. So our bodies actually physically react to different punctuation marks as we see them. And you said in the book there's another really interesting study you mentioned that people perceive the same message differently when it's in a text message versus in print.
FLORENCE HAZRAT
Yes, exactly. So those were … there's plenty of those studies. This has really been replicated that when there is a kind of communication that's not super information heavy. Let's say it's maybe just something, [like] "Should we go to the cinema? Would you like some pizza? Can I bring some pizza?" And then the answer is yes or no or okay.
And if there is a full stop at the, or period, at the end of this one-word answer in text messaging that comes across as passive aggressive or a bit snappy — not very friendly because it's such an informal medium where we don't need full stops anymore. We don't need periods anymore because just by virtue of sending a message, it's clear that the message is finished.
We don't actually need punctuation to kind of orchestrate and navigate that anymore. This kind of grammatical, those boundaries. So why do you go to the extra effort to sending this grammatically correct sign? So that must imply that there's something wrong, like something isn't quite right here. And the same has not been replicated in a, just a Post-It note, that somebody leaves somewhere or that people find, or could it kind of that people are being given.
So people were given an exchange on, the same exchange of the text message on the piece of paper, and the full stop was there, and they didn't feel that it had some kind of passive aggressive tone. So again, I think it really depends on the medium as well. So in the whole of the history of punctuation, there's, uh, it has always grown together with the medium of writing the scroll, the book, then, printing technology brought new kinds of ways of expressing and, and letting the page talk.
So the page has a rhetoric right now. The screen has a rhetoric and it really all depends on how we produce text, and we are incredibly adept at telling these really, really minute differences in these sort of very subtle emotions.
MIGNON FOGARTY
That is amazing. And a bunch of people also you talked about how we use punctuation to express ourselves and things like that. A bunch of people wanted me to ask you how you feel about multiple exclamation points and, you know, one, maybe two, how many is too many? Talk about those, like, expanding rows of exclamation points.
FLORENCE HAZRAT
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I think for grammar books even one is too many. I never came, uh, [to] a kind of guide, the penguin, the Oxford, the Chicago Manual of Style that said it's okay to use even one. Every book will tell you that you need to be careful. Every writing style book will tell you you need to be careful, which I guess it's true.
I am, I think, relatively liberal in my use of exclamation marks, but I also confess that I sometimes go back, and I change them when I write something in the spur of the moment, an email, and then I will rethink actually, to whom does it go? What is the context? How well do I know this person?
And I think most people will actually do that, and they will again be able to really adapt it according to the context and according to the relationship between them and the writer and the receiver. But I, with this book, I really try to liberate people a little bit and to say, you know, do what works, what you feel works.
Because the kind of bad press that the exclamation mark has received is actually relatively recent that hasn't been around in the Renaissance at all. In the Renaissance, anything, anything goes as long as it's rhetorically effective. And the exclamation mark, with being able to kind of prime us for emotion and make us sit up and, and kind of perk up, and look and pay attention, I think that's a really effective mark. So this distrust of the mark, which I think also is a representative of a distrust of emotion and of the power of writing and of the power of the written word, is quite recent actually.
I would say maybe as recent as a hundred, 150 years.
MIGNON FOGARTY
Oh, that's interesting. I will say I have exclamation points in my grammar books, although, I was just editing one of them, and I noticed there were two on one page, and it was past the point where they told me I could make any changes in the text, and I begged them to take out the second one. So, thinking about the … so we talked about the multiple exclamation points. Another listener, Sarah, asked about combining the exclamation point with the question mark and wanted to know which one comes first.
FLORENCE HAZRAT
Mm-hmm. I think it's probably likely that the question mark will come first, or people will tend to take that first or put that first and, and then put the exclamation mark. But I have also found the other way around, or even a question mark, exclamation mark, question mark, a kind of triplet that sort of like … or the other way around where it sort of embraces one another.
But there seems to be some kind of meaning attached to that when we see it. Whether there's perhaps a bit more emphasis on the exclamation and the exclamation mark will come first. And when there's a bit more emphasis on the incredulity of the rhetorical question, then the question mark will come first.
But there are no rules. And again, many grammar guides will kind of even be careful when it comes to this … these two sort of being bunched together because it's had … those kind of things have such punching power that they really make you sit up when you read them and when you see them.
MIGNON FOGARTY
Right, and you really aren't supposed to do it in formal writing, but we know everyone does it online. We see it all the time on social media. So although there are no conventions, as you said, that's interesting that whichever one you wanna emphasize most kind of put first.
Now let's back up for a minute because in the beginning I stumbled a lot over the difference between "exclamation point" and "exclamation mark." So, a bunch of people also asked, what's the difference between the two? Why do we have two names for this mark?
FLORENCE HAZRAT
The difference is, I guess, that historically speaking, the mark was actually called "point" or probably "note," so we had a note of interrogation. We had a note of admiration. The Latin would be puntos admirativos, puntos interrogativos. So point … a lot of languages, especially romance languages like Italian, they will keep that kind of point — the heritage of the point. But then in English speaking Renaissance, people started to call it a note — a note of admiration, a note of interrogation, and it took actually quite a long time until the first "mark" was being used. I think it was in the late 17th century. And Dr. Johnson in his dictionary in I think 1765, still uses a note of exclamation. And so the question is even where does the "mark" come from before it even becomes a point, a question between the point and the mark? And I haven't quite been able to pinpoint things yet, but Professor David Crystal, who has also worked on punctuation, has kindly shared with me in a private conversation that perhaps the change happened in the sort of 1850s, 1860s where the US was using "exclamation point" and in the UK there was a strong anti-US feeling.
There was a kind of a political struggle going on — an economic tug of war — and they wanted to distance themselves from all things American, and they started to use "exclamation mark." Then the question for me is why "question mark"? So I really haven't been able to kind of piece together the exact histories of when, what was used, where, who brought it over, where did it start?
David Crystal thinks perhaps have started in schools where we often see in the past reforms of spelling or reforms of grammar and then kind of trickles out from schools or from grammatical publications.
MIGNON FOGARTY
Amazing. So it was a point first and then, well, it was a note first, the note of admiration, then the exclamation point, and then the mark.
Cool. Thank you. That's amazing. Yeah. And then sort of in this a little bit on the same lines, with different country issues, Dan wanted to know what's up with Spanish and other languages where you have the inverted exclamation point and question mark at the beginning of sentences.
Like, how did that come about? Was that first, and we just dropped it, or was it added later? And, and what does it do for us?
FLORENCE HAZRAT
Mm-hmm. So the Spanish is … the Spanish practice of having the inverted exclamation and question mark at the beginning of the sentence to kind of, again, prime you for what's coming, because sometimes in languages we have ways of marking that that is a question through a question word or through inverting the verb and the noun or the pronoun structure, for example.
And then it's kind of clear that a question is coming. And still even in those languages, I think we still have punctuation in order to be able to read more quickly in order to really understand, better to clarify what's going on to disambiguate. So even in languages where we technically wouldn't need punctuation to tell us what's going on and to tell us how our tone would or should be if we were to read it out, that's still useful.
So that's kind of the first thing that I think I want to clarify because lots of people are saying, you know, we don't, English wouldn't even need that. Well, it would still be kind of useful to have it. And actually people who have been thinking about language reform, for example, in the Renaissance, have said, well, why don't we just attach these marks at the beginning as well?
They haven't been thinking about inverting necessarily, but they said, well, they tune the voice. So kind of makes sense to put it at the beginning. But the kind of language reforms that people were thinking about for quite some time, for 500 years, 600 years, many of them just didn't, didn't pick on, didn't trickle out of the university or out of like a small circle of people who were interested in language.
And I think that's also, that really also goes to show how slow and fast sometimes language change is, as you know, any practice, any convention sometimes can really take off and sometimes it takes long, long, long time to be established. And so the same goes with the Spanish inversion that was instituted by the Spanish Royal Academy.
So this institution that was like taking care of, standardizing language and of kind of having a certain form of eloquence or elegance, which was in other European languages too, in France and in England, and in Italy, you had these academies coming in the Renaissance and later Renaissance were supposed to sort of take care of the language.
And the Spanish Academy says in 1754, they give kind of precepts on orthography or spelling. And they also say, well, we should actually attach this inversion at the beginning so that we know how to read something out. It makes perfect sense, kind of, but even then, it took a long time to be established and only in the 1850s or so people actually started to be using it.
I don't speak Spanish, but I have talked to Spanish friends about it, and they say, well, it's not really something that they use very often. You see it in, you know, official text or newspapers, or books, but in the texting they're not really using it. When they write emails, they're not really using it.
So, again, it's kind of interesting that something that's actually useful hasn't really found this very widespread acceptance, and part of me wonders whether that is, that people actually find it interesting or like curious not to know what's coming after. And there's a bit of an element of surprise where maybe, you know, punctuation is supposed to disambiguate, but actually it also can bring ambiguity or it can, when it's not there, you know, the ambiguity reigns and somehow or other, that seems to be more interesting to people than to know what's coming.
MIGNON FOGARTY
That is interesting. Oh my gosh. It seems, on the one hand, it seems so useful and on the other hand, yeah, you're saying people actually don't use it that much, and you're right. Now that you mention it, I'm taking Duolingo Spanish, you know, playing with that, and they don't do it at the beginning. I had not noticed that before. Are there languages other than Spanish that have it officially, at least at the beginning?
FLORENCE HAZRAT
No, I haven't really found that. Punctuation is in all kinds of languages, in sign language, in braille or for blind people. You have punctuation in Mandarin, in Persian. It seems to really be in all languages. So that's a really, it's kind of a human thing, a human impulse to want to make sense of borders and to perhaps tell a reader how to read something.
But I haven't come across the inversion. However, historically speaking, there are loads and loads of attempts. To signal a rhetorical question, for example, and inversions have played a part in the past as well, just that people, you know, people just didn't pick it up. And irony. People always want to mark irony, today as well.
Online we have different ways of marking, for example, a hashtag, #irony. I mean, that's kind of the most perhaps obvious way of going about it and maybe a little bit too obvious for, you know, someone's taste. Where irony actually implies that it's implicit and you know that you need to interpret a little bit.
And have the pleasure of interpretation, but the history of writing and the history of punctuation is littered with people until this very day who seriously try to introduce new punctuation and new marks that try and fix meaning, and try and fix ambiguity and tell the reader when something is going on that's not the actual meaning. So when irony is going on, and until this very day, we have designers, we have writers who really put forward suggestions on new signs to express certain kinds of emotions or states of being or irony, but it just doesn't seem to be working.
We seem to be happy with what we have. And I, as a punctuation fan, I really delight in those inventions, new inventions because people are being playful, and they're using new medium of new technology and so on. On the other hand, I'm also really delighted that people kind of like to guess and to interpret and to really spend time and, and give a little bit of attention to the writing that's in front of them.
MIGNON FOGARTY
Yeah. I loved all the examples in your book of the punctuation marks that we don't really use, but that people have created over the years. There's just so many of them, and they're just fascinating. And actually, this just reminded me, I almost forgot to ask you, everyone — everyone — wanted me to ask you about the interrobang and how it came to be and what you think of it, and just any thoughts you have on that wonderful punctuation.
FLORENCE HAZRAT
Mm-hmm. So the interrobang is a way of circumventing the question about, does the question mark come first or the exclamation point when we have a rhetorical question? Because in 1962, an advertising agent, Martin Speckter thought, okay, we maybe need to do something about this kind of a bunching together of question and exclamation mark. Why don't we kind of superimpose them? And have a new sign that's really just the superimposition of an old sign and call it the interrobang? So he asked people, and people voted for the names and so on. He was sort of the father and kind of ushering in the interrobang.
But that comes from interrogation, so like question mark and bang, which is like printer slang for the exclamation mark. And they were so just superimposed and he did that. Partially also because he said we need a kind of new sign for the craziness of our times. Our times, you know, the 1960s — so many changes and so many political revolutions and social revolutions and so on.
And he said, we need a time ... we need a mark to express the shock and the kind of uncertainty of the age, and I think maybe we also resonate with it today. And every generation will somehow resonate that, and every generation somehow propose new marks. And unfortunately, the interrobang didn't become as widespread as it maybe could have.
There are typewriters where this key exists or where you can buy a key and include it. It's still in Unicode, it's still around. It does have lots of fans who adamantly use it, but again, we seem to have just been fine with the two marks bunched together. And so it's always been a little bit at the fringes.
I love it. I think it's very useful. I think it's not new as such because it's really just putting two things together and like superimposing them and having one kind of sign doing the work of two others before. So I'm not sure whether I would say it's revolutionary like, for example, the brackets have been, or the exclamation mark itself, or maybe even the dot, dot, dot.
You know, those kinds of things seem to be revolutionary for me. But I like it. I think it's a curious and a kind of fun thing to be using.
MIGNON FOGARTY
Yeah. I'm always happy when I see it somewhere just as a fun little surprise. Getting back to the questions Isabelle wanted me to ask, if, you know, how many exclamation points are actually in your book?
FLORENCE HAZRAT
Oh, I think that'll be hard because I used the sign as a replacement for the word as well, so sometimes I would use the exclamation mark, and sometimes I would use the sign, the kind of bold, in bold phase. And we also chose to put three little exclamation marks together in order to section off parts of the text.
So there's a lot, there's really a lot. I think I personally, when I wrote, I think maybe I used four or five. I don't think I used very many. And come to think of it, I don’t know whether I did that consciously because there was so much exclaiming anyway. But I was very glad that my publisher allowed me to have a kind of elocution punctuation, I think. That's sort of more when I would naturally pause while I'm speaking rather than where grammar asks for it. I mean that's for sure covered. And I'm German, so we have very strict grammar rules when it comes to punctuation that I think are actually stifling creativity, and I'm very sad that my nephews and nieces will be downgraded when they make a mistake, a supposed mistake, and misplace a comma and so on.
So I'm very glad that I'm writing in English where things are a little bit freer and sort of more personal. And my publisher was very good in allowing me to write to punctuate the way that I felt was right, and that was rhetorical and was according to breath, rather than strict rules.
MIGNON FOGARTY
Nice. And that actually reminds me of a section in the book where you talked about Jane Austen and how it seems maybe her editor put exclamation points in her book.
Can you talk a little bit more about that?
FLORENCE HAZRAT
Yes. So, um, we don't actually have a lot of manuscripts by Jane Austen and there are some from her when she was a young teenager. She was writing … her writing life … she only became 42 unfortunately, but her writing life really spans 30 years. She was writing for her household, for her family, little plays, and she was as witty as she was later when she was a young teenager actually as well.
And then we have probably some drafts. We don't really know whether these were the final drafts she sent to her publisher, her editor, who would then look them through, but possibly these are quite late versions of Persuasion. Persuasion was published posthumously, so that's her last novel, or complete novel rather.
And we have these two chapters and we can compare them. So how does the late version of these two chapters look against the actually published book? And it seems that Jane Austen was really writing for … writing with an ear. She, as a teenager, she wrote plays, little kind of performances for her household and that kind of writing, for with the spoken voice in her ear really shows because she has lots of dashes, words underlined, exclamation marks and semicolons and dashes. So it's quite a crowded page, you know, scratching out as well. Not very much, but you know, it's not the very prim and lady author that maybe posterity and we now want to think of her.
It's actually somebody who's very aware of feelings and why people need to perhaps sort of repress and channel their feelings in her novels. It doesn't mean that that was something she espoused, and we see in the punctuation how she's so aware and so alive to speaking and the rhythms of speaking.
And then her actually published texts where, um, are much more stripped of. There's very lively punctuation. No underlinings of course, and very few capitalizations, exclamation marks taken out, dashes taken out. The question now is is this a kind of punctuation mansplaining that, you know, she had her editor and her publisher who were like, oh my God, this woman is too emotional and we have to take all of this out.
Or was it perhaps something that is more of a treatment or a kind of beautification of a book. Perhaps writers used to expect that because Wordsworth, for example, or Byron, these were these, you know, big writers whose letters we have and who say, I can't punctuate for my life. Please, somebody else punctuate this for me.
So perhaps that was something that people expected and that was actually an honor done to a book. So I don't wanna kind of demonize that, these editors of hers. But I do think it's really interesting to look at the manuscripts and to have a kind of clearer picture of Jane Austen, the way that she was working actually.
MIGNON FOGARTY
Amazing. Yeah. So if any listeners, if you feel like you struggle with punctuation, you're not alone.
Amazing writers also struggle with punctuation. A listener named Tom … a lot of writers have feelings, strong feelings about punctuation. And Tom sent me a quote from Terry Pratchett, an author I love actually. Saying, exclamation marks are a sure sign of someone who wears his underpants on his head. And he wanted to know if that is real.
And so I looked it up, Tom, and it is real. Terry Pratchett was not a fan of the exclamation point, but in your book, I mean, a lot of great authors use a lot of exclamation points. I think it was Salman Rushdie and Tom Wolfe, do you wanna talk about them and their love of this mark?
FLORENCE HAZRAT
Yes, yes. Yeah. Salman Rushdie, for example, for his novel that has just won these incredible prizes over and over again, there are six exclamation marks on average on each page. So I think it's 2,300, 2,800 or so in this normal sized novel. And Tom Wolfe as well. 2,300. I think that's three per page or so.
And that really does show, especially when they bunched together, and I think both of these novels are kind of eighties, early nineties, have this eighties vibe of like punk color, a social kind of friction, and especially Rushdie, of course, magical realism where it's just super dense and the boundaries between reality and kind of fictional magic become permeable.
So I think the exclamation, it, you know, people or writers often get told, don't use them and be careful and drawing attention to yourself, but that those kind of writers really bely this prescription perhaps, or this warning. So again, I think it's really what you make of it. There's nothing bad in exclaiming.
There's nothing bad in emotion. I think the way that we … the important thing is to use it in a kind of artistic way and to perhaps give it meaning really.
MIGNON FOGARTY
Right. Wonderful. Well, we have just honestly touched the surface of all the amazing things that were in this book that I loved so much about it. It's called "An Admirable Point, a Brief History of the Exclamation Mark." It's by Dr. Florence Hazrat. Thank you for being here with me today. Where can people find you if they want to catch up more and learn more about you?
FLORENCE HAZRAT
Yeah, so I have a website that's just my name, FlorenceHazrat.com, and there's lots of blog entries on all things punctuation and a bit of Renaissance too, because I'm a Renaissance scholar and I send out a monthly newsletter about what I do, new kind of publications, new things I'm thinking about both in terms of punctuation, but also Renaissance writing, so stuff about Shakespeare. So that'll be there too. And also on Twitter, so I have a Twitter account as well.
MIGNON FOGARTY
Wonderful. And I also appreciated the cute pictures of your dog on your website.
So thank you again for being here with me today, Florence.
FLORENCE HAZRAT
Thank you for having me. Thank you for chatting about the exclamation mark, Mignon.
MIGNON FOGARTY
You bet.