The idea of shifting from admiration to exclamation is telling: admiration is about something outside of you (‘Look at your achievement!’); exclamation is all about you (‘Aye me!’): the exclamation mark is the selfie of grammar. In fact, the duplicity of the mark has been there for a long time. In Randle Cotgrave’s French/English dictionary of 1611, the author describes it as ‘the point of admiration (and of detestation)’. (As a fan of punctuation, I’m rather fond of those cloak-and-dagger brackets.) It was the bibliophile Dr Johnson who then coined the term ‘exclamation’ for ‘pathetical’ sentences – those involving passions – from where it became the ‘exclamation point’ in the USA and ‘exclamation mark’ in Britain. (For more on this fascinating history, I point you to David Crystal’s Making a Point.)

‘The mark of the internet’

Punctuation marks in general, and exclamations in particular, were much more frequently used up until the end of the 19th Century. The Victorians had a real predilection for the exclamation mark. Anton Chekhov even wrote a short story for them called The Exclamation Mark – about a paranoid civil servant, very unlike Trump, who in 40 years realised he hadn’t used an exclamation mark once. After the turn of the century, it was the lexicographer Fowler brothers, in their King’s English from 1906, who called for all quiet on the exclamation front, arguing in favour of the ‘lighter’, more minimal punctuation we still use today – a backlash against the grammatical excesses of their grandparents.