Have you ever been faced with the dilemma of writing a sentence that was both a question and an exclamation, and you didn’t know what punctuation to use? And if you used both, you didn’t know whether the question mark or exclamation point should be first?
What the hell happened here?!
Well, according to my bible, the Chicago Manual, the question mark is before the exclamation point in an exclamatory question. Okay, that answers that question!
But then I started digging and discovered that there actually is a punctuation mark that combines the two. Isn’t that wonderful?!
It’s called an interrobang. It’s been around since 1962, and can be found in the Windings font, which explains why I’ve never seen it or heard of it before. Maybe you’ve seen it? Did you know it had a name?
Call me weird, but I can’t wait to see what other punctuation I can discover.
1 Comment
November 24, 2008 at 7:22 pm
Wow! I never heard of that one either. It’s an interesting tidbit, though from a typesetter’s perspective I’d advise people not to use it. And if they must use such odd punctuation use the regular marks instead. My reasoning is that as the text is flowed in the designer’s layout software, she may not have the Wingdings font loaded (as a Mac user I rarely do). When the ?! comes in, the machine won’t know what the heck that is and neither will the designer—so your intent would be lost on them. Instead a strange missing glyph symbol will appear and she’ll be left guessing what really goes there.