Skip to main content

Interrobang: The Latest Punctuation Mark

Image
By

With the addition of the letter J to the Roman alphabet in the early 16th century, languages that use that alphabet haven’t seen any new letters.  It’s hard to make the case for a new letter once literacy is widespread, since at that point, most everyone will already agree that the letters currently in use are enough.  The same thing goes for punctuation marks: who needs a new one, and how can you convince anyone to adopt it?  You’d need marketing skills to pull that off.

Perhaps it’s unsurprising that it took an ad man to invent and promote a new punctuation mark, which he did with some success.  This visionary was Martin K. Speckter, the head of Martin K. Speckter and Associates, a Manhattan advertising agency.  In 1962, Speckter proposed the addition of a new punctuation mark in an article he wrote for Typetalks magazine, a trade publication about printing and typography.  The idea was that advertisers needed a new punctuation mark to convey disbelief.  For example, the phrase “You call that a raise?” suggests surprise, but the question mark doesn’t capture that.  Writing the phrase “You call that a raise!” doesn’t clearly express the same feeling, either.  Cartoonists have long split the difference by writing it “You call that a raise?!” but doubling punctuation is not usually done in English.

The new punctuation mark was a combination of the two: “You call that a raise‽” is how it looked.  Speckter solicited suggestions for a name for his new punctuation mark.  There were many suggestions, including exclamaquest and QuizDing, but the winner among the readers’ suggestion was interrobang.  

Interrobang is a portmanteau of interrogate and bang.  (Bang was an old typesetter’s slang term for exclamation point.)  The concept was created, and starting in 1962, advertisements… didn’t use it that much.  But interest in the interrobang did take off four years later.  In 1966, American Type Founders, who controlled 85% of all typesetting in the United States, issued the Americana typeface.  This would be ATF’s last new typeface (or font) before closing their doors following a bankruptcy in 1993, but it would also be the first typeface to include the interrobang.

In 1968, some Remington typewriters started offering an interrobang key on their newer models, with Smith-Corona to follow with including it on some of their typewriters in the 1970s.  The word started to appear in dictionaries, adding to its legitimacy.  Despite these early successes, the interrobang never really took off the way its inventor hoped it would.  Who would have thought‽

Today, many word processing fonts include the interrobang, even though still hasn’t gained common currency in English or in any other languages.  It still has a devoted following—unfortunately, not a following in print!
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How the Lemon was Invented

By
Lemons How do you make a lemon?  Silly question, isn’t it?  You just take the seeds out of one and plant them, and wait for the tree to come up, right?  That’s true, but it hasn’t always been that easy.  Lemons today are a widely cultivated citrus fruit, with a flavor used in cuisines of countries where no lemon tree would ever grow.  You might think that it was just a matter of ancient peoples finding the trees, enjoying their fruit and growing more of them, but that’s not true.  The lemon is a human invention that’s maybe only a few thousand years old. The first lemons came from East Asia, possibly southern China or Burma.  (These days, some prefer to refer to Burma as Myanmar .  I’ll try to stay out of that controversy here and stick to fruit.)  The exact date of the lemon’s first cultivation is not known, but scientists figure it’s been around for more than 4,000 years.  The lemon is a cross breed of several fruits.  One f...
6 comments
Read more

Origins of the Word Hoser, eh?

By
Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas as cultural icons Bob and Doug McKenzie These days we often hear Canadians referred to as “Hosers”.  It’s a strange word, and it sounds a little insulting, but it’s sometimes used more with affection than malice.  Any such word is difficult to use correctly, especially if you don’t belong to the group the word describes.   I can’t say I feel comfortable throwing the word around, myself, but I can offer a little information about it that might shed some light on what it means. First off: is it an insult?  Yes… and no.   The word hoser can be used as an insult or as a term of endearment; the variation hosehead , is certainly an insult.  It’s a mild insult, meaning something like jerk or idiot or loser .  Its origin is unclear, and there are several debatable etymologies of the word.  One claims that it comes from the days before the zamboni was invented, when the losing team of an outdoor ice hockey game...
1 comment
Read more

The Whoopie Cap

By
What can you do with your father’s old hats?  If you were born after, say, 1955, the answer is probably “Not much.”  Men were still wearing fedoras in the 1970s and 1980s, but by 1990, fashion had turned to the point where unless you were Indiana Jones, the hat didn’t look right.  Some blame Jack Kennedy for starting it all, strutting around perfectly coiffed and bare-headed in the early 1960s.  In 1953, Harry Truman, a haberdasher by trade, stepped out of office, and just eight years later we had a president who didn’t care for hats?  The times, they were a-changin’. If you set the WABAC machine to the 1920s or 1930s (when Indiana Jones was supposed to have lived), you would see the fedora was still very much in style.  Men just didn’t leave the house without a hat of some kind, and for what remained of the middle class, the fedora was the topper of choice.  But like any other piece of clothing, hats wear out, too.  When that happened, you’d ju...
Post a Comment
Read more