Originally shared by Matthew Baggott"The exclamation point is singular among all punctuation because it has no true grammatical function in English except to amplify a feeling—excitement, enthusiasm, or shock—presumably not adequately conveyed by the words selected. It wasn’t even a standard feature on typewriters until the 1970s. Before then, you had to be judicious about that exclamation point because assembling it required that you type a period, backspace, and type an apostrophe above it." --Pamela Haag,
http://theamericanscholar.org/death-by-treacle/
http://theamericanscholar.org/death-by-treacle/