Tuesday September 28, 2004
Please Phrase Your Answer in the Form of a Very Loud Question
When I first saw this item about the “interrobang,” I expected to read about some new, barely legal intelligence-gathering technique from Abu Ghraib. It turns out, however, that the interrobang — which looks like this “‽” — is just a punctuation mark that didn’t quite catch on. To wit:
In 1962, the interrobang (‽) was introduced by the New York publishing establishment as “a twentieth century punctuation mark.” The interrobang combined the functions of a question mark and an exclamation point. It received some attention at first, but never caught on, although for a brief period during the 1960s it was added to some typewriter keyboards.
If you would like to help bring the interrobang back, and I know you do, this code will do it:
<span style="font-family: Lucida Sans Unicode;">‽</span>
Reviving a dead punctuation mark. Doesn’t that sound like fun‽‽‽
(via BoingBoing.)
