“It’s your first day as an American, and you’ve already gone viral,” I told my husband.

My spouse, who has little use for social media and has never tweeted, looked at me like I was crazy. I had tweeted a photo of the welcome letter he’d received that morning at his naturalization ceremony in St. Louis. Labeled “a message from the President of the United States,” it was a beautifully written, undated form letter given to new American citizens.

It was signed by Barack Obama.

“My British-born husband takes his oath of citizenship today,” my tweet said. “In the packet for new Americans, the welcome letter from POTUS is from Obama.”

He’d done a double-take when he noticed the signature, wondering if he’d misread it. Then he Googled Obama’s signature to compare, and sure enough, it was from 44 -- not 45.

We laughed about it, and apparently the internet found it pretty funny, too.

By the end of the weekend, the tweet had been liked more than 175,000 times. Several sites posted “stories” about the snafu, simply reprinting my tweet and some of the rather hilarious reactions to it. The Hill asked the White House for comment, but had not received a response.

George Takei posted one such story on his Facebook page, noting that it was “probably better this way” -- as opposed to what such a letter from this new administration might say, I suppose.

I was contacted by Buzzfeed and Mashable, who wanted more details: Was it an oversight by the current administration? A petty retaliation by an office worker? A typical delay in turnover from one administration to the next?

The packet and letters are distributed by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. In a statement sent to The Hill, USCIS Press Secretary Maria Elena Upson said that around 200 Obama-signed letters were sent out due to an administrative error.

The unforced error sparked lots of theories and wishful thinking by those who feel alienated by the current administration. Of course, it also prompted some ugly messages from trolls who said my husband should be “deported.”

For the past 17 years, I’ve asked my husband to give up his British citizenship and become an American.

After all, he’s lived here nearly his entire life, arriving when he was just 6 weeks old. Both his parents, now deceased, were Americans. He and two siblings were born in the U.K. while his father, a physician, completed medical training there.

His mother was an American by birth whose family roots in the Midwest went back many generations. His father was a naturalized citizen. All his siblings eventually filed the paperwork to become American citizens, but he was a holdout. Despite marrying a native-born American and having our children here, he held on to the notion that it might come in handy one day to have a U.K. passport.

He had been a permanent legal resident in America his entire life, and the only things he couldn’t do were vote and serve on a jury. For all intents and purposes, he felt like an American, and that was good enough for him.

It wasn’t enough for me.

In this political era, I wanted him to have all the rights and protections conferred upon citizens. So, after years of debate, he finally agreed.

It was a beautiful ceremony, complete with courthouse singers who sang one of the loveliest renditions of “America the Beautiful” we’ve ever heard. Then, like I always do, I teared up during the national anthem. It was more than just that swell of emotion that comes whenever I think about the ideals this country was founded on. It was witnessing this room full of hopeful new Americans, many of whom risked a great deal to come here and share in our vision of what we can be together.

I was so proud to see my husband, who has quietly given so much to this country, finally become a citizen.

His considerable professional contributions are outweighed by projects like the one he undertook a year and a half ago, when he spent his weekends rehabbing an old house his family owned. He fixed it up so that a newly arrived refugee family could have a place to make a fresh start. He’s always finding small, and large, ways to give back without ever seeking credit or anything in return.

He may have just recently made his citizenship official, but he’s long been an example to me of what makes America great.

The first thing he did as an American was register to vote.

I’m waging a lonely war against a rampant punctuation mark.

A year ago, The New York Times wrote forebodingly about the decline of the period, which now signifies a weighty intent if used while texting. But I am far more disturbed by the rise of the exclamation point. Everywhere I look, I’m bombarded by this tall, pointed signifier of overwhelming emotion.

Has this punctuation mark become ubiquitous because our discourse has risen to a fever pitch? Or because we’ve co-opted a mark of astonishment or severity to instead convey solidarity or friendliness?

I took my concerns to two language scholars, who both tried to convince me to give up the fight.

Exclamation mark avoidance is just as much a fetish as its abuse, said Geoff Nunberg, a linguist who teaches at the University of California-Berkeley. Overuse is particularly vexing to writers and journalists who have been trained to use the marks with restraint, he said.

I argued that those of us who use it sparingly are on the right side of language.

Relax, Nunberg practically exclaimed at me. It’s not that there’s a proliferation of exclamation points. It’s just that we see a lot more casual conversation, in the form of texts and tweets, that used to be spoken. And people attempt to reproduce the rhythms and contours of natural speech in their conversational writing, he said.

That’s true, I agreed. But I suspect there’s more to it than that.

The president himself is a lover of the exclamation point. Philip Cowell of the BBC writes that in 2016 alone, @realDonaldTrump posted 2,251 tweets using exclamation marks. He’s far more likely to end a tweet with a shriek than not.

“Overuse of any punctuation mark tells us something about ourselves, in the same way overuse of any object does. How you punctuate your sentences might have something to do with how you punctuate your life,” Cowell writes. Drawing attention to itself, the exclamation point is the selfie of grammar.

Preach, my comrade. In its excess, the exclamation point is garish and loses all potency.

Melanie Walsh, a doctorate student in American Literature at Washington University, is teaching a course in the fall about the pressures that social media puts on language.

“The way we use a period or other punctuation is evolving right before our very eyes,” she said. But she adds that this is not a bad thing: Language is always evolving. Maybe an individual exclamation mark doesn’t have the same meaning anymore -- maybe now five exclamation marks in a row have a new meaning.

But there’s no consensus in this new meaning, I said. It’s cloudy. Some people only use exclamations with close friends, to differentiate personal from business correspondence. Others use more exclamation marks with acquaintances to imply a familiarity that doesn’t really exist. Some use it to soften a message that may come across too strong, while others want to pump up their words with a bullhorn at the end.

Can we really trust people who end every text or tweet with an exclamation?

Walsh says she shies away from making value judgements about changes in language, adding that our ever-changing devices also influence our punctuation use.

“When I had a flip phone, I would be stingy with exclamation points,” she said. “When I got an iPhone, I could rattle off a million so easily.”

There’s a lot of historical baggage in how we use language, Walsh said. It shapes the way we think of ourselves and the way the world should be. We consider it an affront when people use language in a way that we don’t think is correct.

“I’m not saying you’re being nostalgic and curmudgeonly,” Walsh said, in an attempt to protect my feelings. In fact, I took that description as a compliment.

To further prove my point, I searched through recent tweets.

Dan (@sweetdeedly) wrote: “I forget that old people take the exclamation point at the end of a sentence in a text as yelling angrily and it ruins my life.”

(The olds are right, Dan.)

Kara Baskin (@kcbaskin) demonstrated how women use the mark to soften the way their message is perceived:

“-writes gentle, but firm, email

-immediately feels guilty

-adds an exclamation point

-feels better”

(Ladies, please stop feeling guilty for saying what you mean. It’s OK to use a period.)

Meanwhile, JustaGuy (@JMurray247) raised an existential issue: “Thx for the congratulatory text but you didn’t end it with an exclamation point so not sure if you’re happy for me or if you want to kill me”

(The omission could signify a difference in tone, a short attention span or just a lazy texter, JustaGuy.)

After arguing my case, I realized that my discomfort is likely an industry-specific form of snobbery, and puts me into a club of old grammar cranks.

Frankly, I’m fine with that.

(Note: This entire column was produced without deploying a single exclamatory missile, despite the writer’s very strong feelings on the subject.)

I remember glorious summers of nothing.

By “nothing,” I mean everything kids did back then: spending hours at the neighborhood pool and library, staying up all night reading an actual book, walking to the grocery store or a convenience store to browse the candy, playing “Ms. Pac-Man” on a coin-operated arcade game -- and a few years later, on an Atari. Setting up lemonade stands, riding bikes, exploring the trails behind our house, making up games with cousins and other kids in the neighborhood.

This throwback summer was what I envisioned I would give my children for a month this year.

Most of their previous summers have involved camps, activities or summer school. I had a few reasons why I thought a change this year could be mutually beneficial. First, they were old enough, at 14 and 12, to stay at home unsupervised for stretches of time. Also, it was going to be Ramadan, and we would be fasting from dawn to sunset many of those days. I didn’t want to deal with trying to wake them up for summer school when they were tired and cranky, nor did I want them outside in the heat if they were fasting. And, lastly, I had taken on one of those ambitious volunteer projects that had sounded like less work in theory than it ended up being in real life.

Maybe if my kids were less busy, I reasoned, I’d have more time, too.

I also hoped they might learn to become more consistent about chores, read more books and maybe even learn to deal with being bored, a skill lacking in children raised in a digital age.

My plan didn’t work out exactly as I had hoped.

The New Yorker recently published a witty “Shouts and Murmurs” essay about what life was like before the internet. I immediately texted a link to my children.

“I have never read anything more pretentious,” the 14-year-old replied. I informed them that what sounded like parody to them was what my childhood actually resembled.

The younger one, the less cynical of the two, asked, “Did you really do all this stuff?”

I told him about the 13 volumes of children’s World Book Encyclopedia we owned growing up. One hardcover volume was titled “Things to Do.” It’s how I learned to make a papier-mache pinata and what I consulted when I ran out of ideas. It was like a paper version of YouTube tutorials, I tried to explain.

“That seems nice,” he said.

“Childhood was better before the internet,” I texted, caught up in a wave of nostalgia. “It was more free.”

“Childhood was better during the Black Death,” the teenager texted back. “It was more free.”

That’s the sarcasm font, for the uninitiated.

The array of technology at kids’ disposal can easily take over an “unscheduled” summer, like television could in the past. There are so many more options for mindless screen-gazing or scrolling. Combine that with fewer neighborhood kids available during the day: With more single-parent and two-working-parent households, more kids are in camps all day. Older kids are signed up for enrichment activities or summer school, out of both necessity and a culture of competitive parenting. I have a friend who sets an alarm to schedule her son for the camps he wants the minute registration opens in March.

My kids’ digitally enhanced boredom (aka hours playing video games and surfing memes on Instagram) made me feel anxious and guilty. While their friends were probably doing calculus, writing dramas in French and building robots, my kids were watching “Bob’s Burgers” reruns and texting me pictures of an empty fridge, captioned “We legit have no food.”

Their unscheduled month of summer boredom was starting to stress me out. So, I signed them up for an hour of math a couple of times a week, just to make sure their brains weren’t rotting. They still did weekly music lessons. Oh, and one of them had multiple rehearsals for a fall production. They also started making their own plans to hang out with their friends.

For an unscheduled summer, I sure was driving them around a lot.

Meanwhile, fitting their schedules into my full-time job and a nearly full-time volunteer project was making my “summer of nothing” more like “summer of daily headaches and losing all my hair.”

Maybe their laid-back summer was bound to feel different from my hazy recollections and rose-tinted memories. When we get older, parts of our childhoods take on the good-old-days patina.

Our summers were better, we tell ourselves. Even our boredom was better.

Blogger Kristen Hewitt wrote a recent post called “Why we are doing nothing this summer,” which went viral. Hewitt described her family’s simple plans: work out, sleep in, watch TV, play outside and go to the pool.

“It’s so easy to be pressured by things we see on social. Ways to challenge our kids and enrich their summer,” she wrote. “But let’s be real -- we’re all tired. Tired of chores, tired of schedules and places to be, tired of pressure, and tired of unrealistic expectations. So instead of a schedule, we’re doing nothing this summer. Literally NOTHING. No camps. No classes and no curriculums. Instead, we’re going to see where each day takes us.”

Hewitt’s low-key summer sounds so much better than mine.

I couldn’t fully commit to the summer of nothing, and it turned into the summer of a little-bit-of-everything. On the upside, the teen is leaving for a three-week sleep-away camp soon, and her brother is signed up for a tennis intensive.

Maybe I can squeeze in a little nothing while they’re gone.