Today is National Punctuation Day! So let’s talk about the interrobang. “What the heck is that‽” you ask/exclaim?

In 1962, advertising agency director Martin K. Speckter had seen one too many sentences ending with ?!. So he suggested that we generate a new punctuation character called “interrobang.” He wrote up his recommendation for the publication TYPEtalks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interrobang

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#NationalPunctuationDay #Interrobang #Language #Grammar #Punctuation #Typeface #Fonts #Keyboards

Martin solicited name ideas from readers. Two runner-ups were “exclamaquest” and “exclarotive.” The winner’s etymology stems from the Latin word “interrogatio,” which means “rhetorical question” or “cross examination,” and “bang,” which is used in the printing industry to mean an exclamation point.

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Graphical treatments were also solicited in Martin’s article. The first application was in the Americana typeface in 1965, and on Remington typewriters in 1968. But even though it’s now officially a unicode character (0x203D) and an HTML character (‽) it’s not part of modern keyboard layouts/commands.

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On macOS, you can add a keyboard replacement in Settings > Keyboard > Text Replacements by copying/pasting the character into the table. Then you can type ?! and see an autosuggestion to convert it for you.

Here’s the character for you to copy: ‽

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@markwyner

Quick, where to I find it on the keyboard. At work it can very well be the most useful one to use ever 🤪

@tsvenson in the third post in this thread I mention that it’s not available as a keyboard character. At least on common/modern keyboards and operating systems.

Here’s the character that you can copy: ‽

@markwyner It is on my Android default virtual keyboard: pressing on ? gives a menu which lets me pick ¿ or ‽

@soaproot sweet! Some operating systems and keyboards do have that in place. I’m glad yours does.

@markwyner signature plastics still has the molds for them, and you can still find us weirdos in the mechanical keyboard space getting keycaps with it on them: https://saberkeebs.com/products/sa-history-of-violets-interrobang

@petejohanson outstanding! Nerds keep everything cool alive. For a long list of reasons I won’t get into, I can’t do the mechanical keyboards. But they’re def cool.

I do have to use one for my SBC that I’m preparing for self-hosting. I have no idea why I’d need that character in the context of command lines, but I’m gonna look into getting that keycap just for funsies.

@markwyner How neat. I keep it on my special page of copyable characters along with a few choice other ones.

https://jessamyn.com/degree.html

@jessamyn ha, ha. That’s great. I’m glad to see you have a list like this. Most of the characters I use regularly are part of my keyboard muscle memory. For the rest, I have some bookmarks. But I should make my own library.

@markwyner Although I love the name we use, I kinda like exclarotive and might mix that in every now and then just to confuse people the way interrobang used to

@kingtor yeah. I actually reflected on those names. I resolved that I would have been happy with either of them as well. 😂

@jessamyn @markwyner oooh I need to do this too