The Origin of the Exclamation Mark

A gasper, a screamer, a dog’s cock, say the old type-setters, frozen at point. But it’s older than type, old as a dried stalk trembling on the way to earth, a mud-dauber tube like a tuneless flute, the trail of a slug down the moss face of a cliff, a severed finger packed in ice, a No. 2 pencil pocked with toothmarks, a snake made of sand, a microphone hung from the ceiling, the fossilized thigh- bone of an extinct sauropod, a string of drilled shells used in lieu of money, or a gas flare on an oil field at night.

Legend says: the word joy written vertically, in Latin, a big letter I balancing on a full belly.