A new favourite punctuation mark!?

Posted by: Ed Jones | 05 February 2007

Indulge me for a moment: I realise that many people have probably never seen the need for a favourite punctuation mark in the first place, and here am I with a new favourite. If you’re interested, my old favourite was the much-maligned ellipsis.

The interrobang was devised in 1962. Typographically, it’s nothing more than an infant in a world of the venerable and ancient (not to mention much more universally accepted) punctuation marks like the full stop and semicolon. It allows you to use a single mark to express that combination of surprise and questioning which usually means writing and exclamation point and a question mark straight afterwards (!?).

Why am I writing this? Because, well, I think we should reinstate the interrobang. According to Wikipedia, it was a fad which never really gained any traction. I’m a fairly conservative punctuator, and I still see fit to use the combination of an exclamation and question mark at least once a month.

That’s definitely often enough to deserve its own mark.

(As a footnote, the interrobang is an accepted Unicode character, and there’s an HTML entity for it too: ‽ - so there’s really no excuse for tardiness in this respect)

Posted in: Creative Social