That the King has continued to write letters to friends throughout his cancer treatment isn’t surprising. Neither is some of the content of these letters, revealed over the weekend.
According to one pen pal, our 75-year-old monarch spoke of his “somewhat battered health”. Another said he complained about feeling like a “caged lion” while stuck at home, yet wrote about his “determination” to beat cancer. But here’s what had me doing a double take: apparently, the King’s writing was “full of exclamation marks”.
I’m sorry – what? I realise that the rules of punctuation have been rewritten by twenty-somethings who will eschew full stops (stern enough to count as “microaggressions”) alongside capital letters (alienatingly formal) but persist in peppering every utterance with exclamation marks, only this is the very opposite of a Gen-Zer. This is the King!
As he celebrates the first anniversary of his coronation, could it be that His Majesty has become infected by exclamation-mark-itis? You’ll remember that in Chekhov’s short story, The Exclamation Mark, the author presents us with a kind of parody of Scrooge’s nightmare visions in A Christmas Carol: a world in which even the most banal sentiment is either emphatic or euphoric, and every sentence adorned with the sickliest form of punctuation out there, the candy floss of typographical symbols.
That world is the one we now live in. Indeed, so contagious is exclamation-mark-itis in digital communications that I regularly have to go through my own emails taking them out before pressing send. But I’ve realised why I put them in there in the first place. Above all, exclamation marks are people-pleasers. They’re there to reassure people that “I’m OK”, and if that’s what the King wants to put across to his friends, I’m not going to fault the impulse. In fact, I find it very touching.
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