Day 19: Interrobang

It is a common dilemma in writing that many sentences are required to end in both an exclamation mark and a question mark, but to write both is considered to demonstrate poor style in formal writing. The reason for wanting to use both is that you are (or a character is) asking a question that is also an exclamation, i.e. it is excited or anxious.

You're kidding, right!?
What the hell!?
How did that happen!?

As you can see from these examples, these sorts of sentences are often repetitions or exclamations of shock. The exclamation mark is necessary to achieve the correct tone, but the question mark cannot be excluded because it is still strictly a question. I've written the exclamation mark before the question mark, which is the less popular way of ordering the punctuation, but it's really all down to style in this case and I prefer it this way around.

It would have been simple for the use of the exclamation and question marks together to become common practice and be grammatically acceptable, but these things are so slow to change (and grammarians are generally pretty set in their ways) that in the mean time someone invented a new punctuation mark to solve the problem. Martin K. Speckter, the head of an advertising agency, created the interrobang in 1962 by combining the two symbols and the word "interrogative" (another word for a question) with "bang" (an informal name for the exclamation mark) to make "interrobang".

The interrobang is a single mark of punctuation representing both a question mark and an exclamation mark, and it looks like this:

It is available from the list of symbols in Microsoft Word; also, the State Library of New South Wales in Australia uses the interrobang as its logo. While obscure and not accepted into general usage, the interrobang is very useful and will hopefully one day become a standard punctuation mark. In the meantime, it simply looks great and has a fantastic name. I encourage you to use it (though not in formal writing, as it is non-standard) and to spread the word about the existence of this glorious punctuation mark.