Exclamation mark campaigners interrupt
Raising Response Rates conference
There were wild scenes at the launch of the
“2006: The Year of Doubling Response Rates” conference as activists who believe
that the exclamation mark is now an endangered species forced their way into
the Toppled Bollard and brought proceedings to a close.
The Exclamitis Protection League
claim that direct mailers are have made the exclamation mark almost worthless
because of overuse in direct mail.
Several of the League members made their
point by carrying banners with the slogan “
However the EPL rejected any notion that
they had been the cause of the riot, pointing out that the Semi-colon Is
Not For Wimps Society had deliberately chosen to meet in the Broken
Glass next door to the Bollard at the same time as they held their own protest.
Chanting the slogan “Save shoes; learn levitation” the SINFWS were
eventually confronted by hundreds of members of the East Midlands
Punctuation Protection Agency – on hand to keep order. “The marks used to clarify meaning
by indicating separation of words into sentences, clauses and phrases cannot
become weapons of literate destruction,” announced Detective Inspector
Apostroph at the subsequent press conference. “We represent the written symbols
that do not correspond to either phonemes of a spoken language nor to lexemes
of a written language. We serve merely to organize and clarify.”
In the hubbub my speech on Doubling Response Rates through the use
of abstract basic
sound segments was rather lost. But I did manage to raise a chant of “Sit down
if you hate inverted commas,” and by and large some good nature was restored.
Billy the Dog awarded free drinks
all round to anyone who could speak for more than twenty seconds without saying
the word “turnip”, and we all went home happy.
Tony Attwood
PS What I would have said, had my speech not been interrupted, is that 2006 is the Year of Doubling Response Rates, and if anyone wants to send me a leaflet or brochure for my comments on how the Response Rate could be doubled, I will be happy to call them back with my answer. No exclamation marks, no references to 18th century poets.