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;">&#8253;</span>


Reviving a dead punctuation mark. Doesn’t that sound like fun

(via BoingBoing.)

Posted by jim at 11:10 AM ||

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