Why everyone’s talking about... Interrobangs

Interrobang?! What the heck is an interrobang?!

A punctuation symbol – pictured below – that does the work of both the question mark and exclamation combined. It was invented in 1962 to convey incredulity, conjoining the interrogation mark, ‘?’, with ‘bang’, printers’ slang for the ‘!’. Rejected names included ‘emphaquest’ and ‘consternation mark’.

Why didn’t it catch on?

Actually, the idea did fire public imagination for a while, even if one article singing its praises was disbelieved as it was published on April 1.

The interrobang was incorporated into typefaces and electric typewriters, but was banjaxed in commercial printing: traditional typesetting machines could store only a fixed number of characters and few printers were ready to sacrifice a familiar one for this brash newcomer.

But American advertising executive Martin K Speckter’s creation stuck around as a cult symbol.

In 2012, a US judge used it in an official court opinion, and the State Library of New South Wales, Australia, has an interrobang as its logo.

So why are we talking about it now?

Fans – and there are plenty – hope it’ll be the next character to find new life in the digital age, as did the once near-obsolete @ or # (not, technically, a hashtag, but an ‘octothorpe’ because of its eight points).

The interrobang is in many digital fonts so could easily be revived. Writer Anne Trubek dubbed it a ‘1960s, type-based version of

WTF?’ (what the f***) – so very relevant today.

But…

Getting new punctuation to catch on is hard as the subject inflames passions: two law professors once duelled over a semicolon. Even exclamation marks are frowned upon (‘It is like laughing at your own joke,’ said novelist F Scott Fitzgerald; though that didn’t stop Salman Rushdie averaging six a page in Midnight’s Children – and that won a Booker Prize!)

Other failed ideas include a backwards question mark (a ‘percontation point’) for rhetorical questions, suggested by English printer Henry Denham in 1575; or a ‘pronequark’ (a question mark on its side) for similar purposes; an ‘irony mark’, the trademarked SarcMark for sarcasm; and the ‘quasiquote’ (denoting a paraphrase).

They’re all still waiting for their moment.