“ Thus, one day Victor Hugo sent a telegram to his publisher. He wanted to know how his new book was doing. His telegram read: “?”; the publisher’s reply: “!”. The exclamation mark, you see, meant Hugo’s book was doing well. The publisher could have deployed sentences of Proustian length to explain the novel’s success among the target demographic of 18- to 35-year-old Parisians, but he saved a few centimes by cutting to the chase.
