Can you believe that there is an actual character that you can type that is a question mark and exclamation point all mashed up into one‽ And can you believe that this character was invented in 1962‽ Are we allowed to be creating new characters‽ I’d like to mash up the parenthesis and the dash so that way I don’t have to worry about which one I’m supposed to use when I’m writing about a side-point.
But back to this mashed-up exclamation point and question mark. It’s called the interrobang. This dude, Martin Speckter was the head of some ad agency, and he thought ads would look better if a single character was used to express surprised rhetorical questions. Some other names considered for the interrobang were: rhet, exclarotive, and exclamaquest.
Interrogatio is Latin for “a rhetorical question” or “cross-examination”; bang is printers’ slang for the exclamation point.
Now how about we get going on merging the parenthesis and the dash‽ (actually, wouldn’t that look like the euro‽)
Huge props to the official Tom of Xanga for commenting on my blog post about Whoat and bringing the interrobang to light.
That is one awesome character
What‽ You must be kidding‽
That’s ridiculous! (Now tell me the keyboard shortcut for it!)
It can be used in HTML documents with ‽ or ‽, although the second form has poor support in common web browsers. The Interrobang can be used in some word processors with the alt code ALT+8253
haha. it converted the text into the actual mark. I copied the text from that last comment from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interrobang#Display
🙂 Next time you’re over, I’m going to show you the interrobang cufflinks I had custom-made. I say “Why not bring back the interrobang‽” Haha! Thanks for the huge props, Matt! You rule!!
Mmmmmmm¬