?!
As you probably already know—if you’ve been reading these posts—I’ve been doing a lot of editing lately (and not just of my own verbiage). That means I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time and energy on things I suspect most readers never even notice (at least if it’s done properly):
Punctuation Marks.
Italicization.
Spacing.
Capitalization.
Paragraph Breaks.
Initialization.
And, of course: Word Choice, Spelling, and Agreement of Tense (since I’m only working in English, Agreement of Gender of nouns and verbs is rarely an issue—other than socio-politically).
One of the things I’ve noticed (a lot) is something I don’t remember ever being addressed in school. Duplication of punctuation marks for emphasis. Now that I think of it, the over-use of exclamation points was frowned upon. One teacher told us that we were allowed to use no more than five of them—in our lifetime!!!
[He’d be so pissed that I just blew through three of them! OK, four…]
But that’s not the kind of duplication I meant. When writing dialogue, one sometimes needs to indicate shocked incredulity on the part of the speaker. The writer can just say that, but it feels like an unnecessary waste of words. Instead, we usually end the speaker’s comment with “?!” .
That certainly feels like it’s breaking some unspoken grammatical—or, perhaps typographical—rule, doesn’t it?
As it turns out, typographers have long been bothered by this very issue. A 1962 article, in Type Talks, asked, “Who would punctuate a sentence like that?!”
A punctuation mark is often meant to convey something about the emotional tone of the sentence it is ending (except in Spanish, where punctuation marks precede, inverted, and follow, upright, the sentence—eliminating all doubt as to the sentence’s meaning). So—given the choices on our keyboard—how are we to express the combination of querulousness and shock (or exasperation) in that Type Talk question?
The answer, logically enough, was the creation of a new punctuation mark: The Interrobang.
I’m willing to bet that—just now—many of you just looked down at your keyboards to find the Interrobang.
How’d that work out for you?
While Interrobangs have been added to the character sets of some typeface libraries, and can even be accessed through the use of some arcane key-stroke combinations (at least for those of us who are fluent in HTML)—I’m not aware of any keyboard that has one that can easily festoon our deathless prose.
Consequently, we still still have to type “?!”.
[look at that: five punctuation marks strung together in a row!]
But, now that we know that—whether we can access them or not—Interrobangs actually exist (somewhere), we’re faced with another issue. The way “?!” is typed, it implies that the speaker has a question, first, then is exasperated by it. The Interrobang shown, above, even suggests that the question contains the emotional shock. What happens when the speaker is outraged first—and then questions his or her own remark?
Do we need two different flavors of Interrobang—when we can’t even get keyboard manufacturers to give us one?!
As unlikely as it might seem, some of you might be interested in reading more about Interrobangs (and such-like matters). If so, I highly recommend Keith Hudson’s book, Shady Characters; The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols & Other Typographical Marks.
A jacket blurb, from Philadelphia Inquirer, says it all: “Funny, surprising, and, of course, geeky.”
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