The Interrobang

[jackolantern]

Has anyone ever heard of this "novelty" punctuation mark? I don't have a way to make one here (I don't think at least), but there is a large picture of one on the site I have linked below. It is a combination of a question mark and exclamation point, and has been proposed to be used modernly in place of the non-standard English interrobang (ie. "?!" at the end of a sentence). What do you think?

Welcome to Interrobang-Mks

[Hortence]

Originally Posted by jackolantern

Has anyone ever heard of this "novelty" punctuation mark? I don't have a way to make one here (I don't think at least), but there is a large picture of one on the site I have linked below. It is a combination of a question mark and exclamation point, and has been proposed to be used modernly in place of the non-standard English interrobang (ie. "?!" at the end of a sentence). What do you think?

Welcome to Interrobang-Mks

In my mind, this novelty punctuation mark doesn't have the same impact as the interrobang (?!) because it's confusing visually. At first sight, I thought it was a dollar sign under an exclamation point. What would you choose between these two punctuation marks to express your amazement/surprise/questionning: What's that_ or What's that?!

[jackolantern]

Well, it has been around for almost 50 years and has never really caught on (although the page linked above lists key-combinations for 3 different interrobangs in the Wingdings font), so I doubt that is going to change anytime soon. I just thought it looked pretty interesting, really, and had never heard of it before.

In reality, it would be a ton of work for every font author to add it to their respective fonts, have it added to newspaper printers, magazines, etc. All that to just save one space as opposed to just using "?!"