Bangorrhea

In her 1958 memoir Beloved Infidel, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s lover Sheilah Graham recalls the famous author’s distaste for exclamation points, the use of which he compared to “laughing at your own joke.” Some have proposed that such overuse of exclamation marks be called bangorrhea, bang being an old printer’s term for that punctuation mark, and -rrhea being a stem that comes from a Greek word meaning “to flow.” This is part of a complete episode.

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