Whether the amount of distress in Germany has increased I do not know, but the number of exclamation marks certainly has. Where we formerly had merely! we now have!!!
Ob das Elend in Deutschland zugenommen hat, weiß ich nicht. Die Interpunktion-Zeichen haben gewiß zugenommen. Wo man sonst bloß! setzte, da steht jetzt!!!
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Saturday, November 21, 2015
Exclamation Marks
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799), Waste Books, L 147 (tr. R.J. Hollingdale):