Think back for a moment to life before emoticons and emojis. What did we do to convey feeling or emphasis in our writing? If we had to be polite, I suppose we could use italics to emphasize. “Listen, this is really important.” If we’re not restrained by decorum, we could YELL by using all caps. “I HATE this.” Finally, we could resort to doubling or tripling up on the old question mark or exclamation point in order to emphasize. “Does this look familiar???”

 

In a previous post called the SarcMark Debate, we talked about how difficult it is to convey sarcasm and irony in written text. We saw how different type designers tried real hard to advocate for the use of a typographic symbol that’d clue people in to humor (just like an exclamation point lets them know there’s a strong emotion). They never did settle on a name for the symbol, and for better or for worse, it didn’t really stick in the canon of punctuation.

 

As it turns out, it’s not the only typographical cue that was strongly advocated for. Enter the interrobang. It’s the equivalent of when we write or type something such as “The dog ate what?!?!?”

 

If you’ve watched or know of the AMC show Mad Men, think of one of those Madison Avenue advertising guys like Don Draper. Picture him trying to go all the way with this new punctuation mark. It’s said one of these guys named Martin K. Spekter “vigorously campaigned for what became known as the interrobang (‽), a fusion of the question mark and exclamation point, to convey a mixture of doubt and surprise.”[1]

 

But rather than just coin the thing himself, he asked the public to join in the naming process. Pretty brilliant if you ask me… a good way to create a buzz and get buy-in. In an article he wrote in 1962, he recommended the “Exclamaquest” and the “Interrobang”. But things got even crazier form there. Readers proposed names like the “Em­phaquest”, “In­ter­ra­point” and the tongue-twist­ing “Ex­clarog­at­ive”.

 

Just repeat that last one out loud for me. “Ex­clarog­at­ive,” emphasis on the “o.” It’s a bit like swallowing an extra cheesy bite of pizza too quickly and getting the cheese stuck halfway down your throat for a moment. Yeah, gag.

 

But because Spekter had already made a bit of a splash with the word interrobang, it wound up sticking.  And it does make sense. Check out the Latin: ‘In­ter­ro­b­ang’, formed from the Latin in­ter­rog­a­tio, trans­lat­ing roughly as ‘a rhet­or­ical ques­tion’, and the Eng­lish ‘bang’, a slang word for ex­clam­a­tion mark, would prove to be the fa­vour­ite from that point on.[2]

 

This mark strutted its stuff in the 1960s in a newly designed typeface called Americana. It even debuted on a specific Remington electric typewriter model as a replaceable key. There was chatter that Spekter would be the first to create a new punctuation mark since the quotation mark in three centuries prior. I know, can you even curb your enthusiasm?! [Insert interrobang]

 

But alas, for a number of different (and somewhat boring) reasons, the interrobang didn’t have the staying power it needed to endure. Much of its decline was logistical in nature (typeface, metal production, printing, technological advances, etc.) In his blog, Keith Houston sums it up like this: “This com­bin­a­tion of factors — the six-year delay in clear­ing the new char­ac­ter’s way from com­pos­i­tion to print­ing; the sheer in­er­tia of punc­tu­ation prac­tice; doubt as to the gram­mat­ical ne­ces­sity for a new sym­bol — sent the in­ter­ro­b­ang to an early grave. By the early 1970s it had largely fallen out of use, and the chance for its wide­spread ac­cept­ance seemed to have been missed.”

 

Cue the well-known song “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina,” replacing Argentina with “My Interrobang.” And just as the song goes, “the truth is I never left you…”, it seems that until this day the interrobang still has a “cult following” according to Amy Einsohn.[3] I shit you not.

 

Again, I’ll borrow from Keith Houston: “Some seed of fas­cin­a­tion with the word or the [interrobang] sym­bol it­self has lodged it­self im­mov­ably into the world of ty­po­graphy, so that the de­bates over its util­ity con­tinue to this day.”[4] 

How, you ask? The interrobang is part of the standard computer character set called Unicode. That’s huge because it’s literally baked into every single computer device in some way, shape or form. It’s made its way into places like the punk music scene and student newspapers. And, as of 2011, Facebook is reported to have supported “at least three dis­tinct in­ter­ro­b­ang re­vival groups.”[5]  If I were a good reporter, I’d update this statistic, but I’m going to just leave this post right here exactly where it is.

What‽

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Sources

[1] Amy Einsohn and Marilyn Schwartz. Copyeditor’s Handbook, University of California Press, 2019. Page 89.

[2] https://shadycharacters.co.uk/2011/04/the-interrobang-part-1/

[3] Amy Einsohn and Marilyn Schwartz. Copyeditor’s Handbook, University of California Press, 2019. Page 90.

[4] https://shadycharacters.co.uk/2011/04/the-interrobang-part-2/

[5] https://shadycharacters.co.uk/2011/04/the-interrobang-part-2/

[6] Main blog image shared with Penny Spekter’s permission to Keith Houston, author of Shady Characters Blog