Sometimes, you learn things from your kids. A few days ago, my son told me about a punctuation mark he had learnt in school. It was called the interrobang. He said it was a combination of a question mark and an exclamation point. And I said, "Really?!"
Aha. See how I used both a question mark and an exclamation point for my rhetorical exclamation? Well, the interrobang replaces that clumsy double punctuation mark. With the interrobang, a rhetorical statement expressed with some excitement can be rendered with a single mark. The interrobang looks like this: ‽
Example:
- "They did what‽"
- "She really said that‽"
- "How can this be‽"
I have never like the look of a string of question marks and exclamation points together. The only time I would do that was when I wrote TV scripts. With lines like, "Who said that?!" it was important to signal to the actor that the question had to be exclaimed.
Reading Wikipedia's entry on the interrobang, it seems Martin K. Speckter, an adman, was also tired of seeing the clumsy looking combination and he invented the interrrobang in 1962. He came up with the word by combining interrogation (point) + bang (printers' slang for exclamation point).
I should start using it more. It's not easy to produce though. In Microsoft Word, you can find the interrobang under Wingdings 2. I found four versions in my copy of MS Word 2003. I guess I'll need to set a shortcut key for it. Hmm, perhaps I should make the combination of ?! autocorrect into the interrobang. Now isn't that a great idea‽
