Someone on the radio this morning reminded me of the interrobang, a delightful idea in typography from the 60s. The interrobang is a question mark mixed with an exclamation point, and you use it instead of typing both together. As in:
You did what‽
Rubber shirts‽
With your sister‽
The interrobang was actually available on some electric typewriters before the fickle crowd moved on to abuse apostrophes. And that’s too bad because it’s a lot nicer than a long string of characters. Bring it back, I say.
I’d also like to suggest that there’s another need for it, and that’s for the word ‘what’. You can say ‘what’ with different intonation.
Alexander Graham Bell: Mr Watson, come here. I want you.
Watson, with rising intonation: What? (meaning: I didn’t hear you)
Watson, with falling intonation: What? (meaning: What is it that you want?)
They both read the same in print, and it’s confusing. Using an interrobang for the second one could alleviate the confusion. Unless Mr Watson wanted to express indignation for what he perceived to be Mr Bell’s inappropriate suggestion.
Or the Toblerone ad campaign. Notice that the model’s ‘What?’ could be ambiguous. I certainly didn’t get it at first.
But if you make it “What‽”, it conveys the right amount of petulant defiance.
I’d love to see the interrobang come back, now that we live in the age of Unicode. And we need a sarcasm mark, too.
25 October 2006 at 11:06 am
Such a useful character, and we let it fade into obscurity…
What’s up with thatΨΨ
25 October 2006 at 4:25 pm
Bring it back I say. And sarcasm mark… genius! would solve so many problems and miscommunication… π
26 October 2006 at 2:49 pm
Oh GOD, I am all for a sarcasm mark. Our abitrary selection from the MSN Messenger emoticons for sarcasm is the pizza slice. It does the job.
26 October 2006 at 11:07 pm
A sarcasm mark? What a terrible idea! Then all the idiots in the world would know we were taking the piss. Where’s the fun in that?
27 October 2006 at 1:02 am
I love this idea! It’s awesome! Sometimes I don’t know whether to do “What?!” or “What!?”, so this would really help me out π Is there some font file we can get it in?
A sarcasm mark would also be useful, although I partially agree with snowqueen, however I’ve been in too many situations where what I’ve been saying has been misinterpreted (badly!) and ended in flames for all involved.
27 October 2006 at 1:14 am
OK. So I went a did procrastinating research on this with a quick scan through wikipedia and there are articles on the sarcasm mark and the irony mark among others. There is a mark for irony, but only suggestions for a sarcasm mark. This appears to be because of the increased use of smileys/emoticons such as π instead.
If you happen to be on the wiki Interrobang page, scroll down the right side until you see “unusual typography” and take a look at the other weird ones there.
27 October 2006 at 4:20 am
I favour the ‘delta sarc’, as first mentioned in Games Magazine. Behold:
Brilliant, HaroldΔ Now what do we do‽
27 October 2006 at 12:40 pm
I feel like I’m fighting the force of progress here, but I don’t particularly like the interrobang β not so much the idea behind the character, but that it’s hard to tell apart from a normal question mark in a small font.
Sarcasm marks would be handy too, since I tend to overabuse the ‘:-P’ tongue-in-cheek smiley for the purpose. Alas, the internet is so primitive when it comes to conveying tones of voice.
Cameron (UWA linguistics student, was in one of your tutes a few years ago…you may not remember me though π
27 October 2006 at 11:50 pm
Ha! The ‘delta sarc’ looks like a pizza slice! Who woulda guessed.
29 October 2006 at 2:01 am
Behold! Cameron has joined us!