Jan18

what?! a follow-up to my exciting ‘huh’ post?!

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Because sometimes periods, commas, colons, semi-colons, dashes, hyphens, apostrophes, question marks, exclamation points, quotation marks, brackets, parentheses, braces, and ellipses won’t do, here is another punctuation mark to work into your everyday communications:

INTERROBANG

You probably already know the interrobang, thanks to its popularity (You did what!?). Though the combination exclamation point and question mark can be replaced by using one of each, they can also be combined into a single glyph. The interrobang was invented by advertising executive Martin Speckter in 1962, who said “it is the typographical equivalent of a grimace or a shrug of the shoulders. It applied solely to the rhetorical, when a writer wished to convey incredulity.” The name is derived from the Latin word interrogatio, which means “questioning,” and bang—how printers refer to the exclamation mark.

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“symbols are nothing but the natural speech of drama”
-tennessee williams
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source: mental flosss

82 responses »

  24. As a retired editor, I’ve been familiar with the interrobang for many years, but don’t recall encountering a font that included the single glyph — until merrildsmith mentioned finding it on her Mac, and low and behold, it’s on my Mac too. ‽ ‽ ‽

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  37. I love those 2 punctuation marks together and want to use them often, but thought it would be confusing.
    Thank you for giving me permission to use it (even if you didn’t intend to lol) !? and for letting me know there was a name for it.
    Blessings to you! ♥♥

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