If you work for a media company long enough, you’ll find that sometimes overuse or abuse of certain words or phrases necessitates an internal ban. These days, the slow but sure creep of ’Net-speak into our stories can mean that sometimes we have to put the brakes on “bae” or sendYAASSSSS on permanent hiatus. I once had a supervisor who even declared war on exclamation points, commanding us to root out the punctuation wherever it reared its noisy head in headlines (We don’t have to shout, he argued).
And that got me thinking about how I use that pesky punctuation not just at work but IRL.
I found the answer I’d long suspected in a study cited by The Cut for its piece, “The Internet Talks Like a Woman.” Researchers found that “women most frequently used smiley faces to indicate not that they were happy, but that they were being humorous (e.g., “That was dumb of me ”).” And that gender-based style extended to exclamation points too! (Er, sorry.)

- See more at: http://nigerianpilot.com/the-real-reason-girls-use-exclamation-points-so-much-will-make-you-sad/#sthash.1GatOW7k.dpuf

Okay?