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.
Transcript of “Bangorrhea”
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s final heartthrob, Sheila Graham, wrote a book about their relationship in 1958 called Beloved Infidel, and in it she writes about his distaste for exclamation marks.
He said, according to her, cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke. It’s so true. Isn’t that true? It’s a thing to avoid, right? It is.
And, you know, there’s a word for this that’s floating around, bang-a-ria. Do you know this word? Bang-a-ria. This is when you use too many exclamation marks? Yes.
Yes, bang is printer slang for… exclamation mark. Yeah. And ria means to run, right? It means to flow.
Yeah. So bang-a-ria is using too many exclamation points. It reminds me of when Conan O’Brien was new on his nightly show, and he would do a weird intake of breath after all of his gags, and it just did not work.
You’re like, no, Conan, stop it. That worked in the writer’s room, but it doesn’t work out here. Yeah, it’s the same thing, right?
