The exclamation point is more than five centuries old, but it can easily be mistaken for the runt of the punctuation family. It wants your forgiveness and attention. It wants undying love, while you’re at it. The mark is to grammar what a Red Sox fan is to baseball, insisting it’s the underdog yet coming out on top, spilling its beer on your lap in exaltation.

To Jonny Sun , a writer on “ BoJack Horseman ” and a viral tweeter, the exclamation point is the wild child. “It’s a rebellion against the weighty rules of grammar that were passed down to us,” he said. “The exclamation point is a way of saying we’re bucking these rules because they feel old fashioned and dusty.” The period, in contrast, “feels like a sigh.”

Authors and editors typically denigrate the insurgent mark as undignified. Veneeta Dayal , a professor of linguistics at Yale, said formal communication has historically separated the informational from the emotional — and the exclamation point lines up with the latter. The author Elmore Leonard advised writers to measure out “two or three per 100,000 words of prose.” F. Scott Fitzgerald said exclamation points amount to “laughing at your own jokes.” The mark was most at home on the children’s shelf, in titles like “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!” and “Good Grief, Charlie Brown!”

Eager to please and good with kids, the exclamation point skews feminine. The writer Amelia Tait calls it “emotional labor” in grammatical form, shouldering the responsibility to ease tension or hurt. Gretchen McCulloch, a creator of the podcast “Lingthusiasm,” said it functions as a “social smile” and a mark of sincerity in a time when irony abounds. It just wants to Marie Kondo your sentences — to clear out a small space and spark some joy. (Its origin is the Latin symbol for joy , io.)

To some grammarians, attempts to condemn the mark smack of a dog whistle for sexism. “Use too many exclamation points and you won’t be taken seriously, use too few and you can come off as cold,” said Deborah Tannen , a Georgetown linguistics professor who helped coin the phrase “double bind.” “It’s the story of women’s lives in a nutshell.”