{"id":93,"date":"2007-12-18T14:47:01","date_gmt":"2007-12-18T20:47:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/?page_id=93"},"modified":"2024-06-28T06:03:19","modified_gmt":"2024-06-28T12:03:19","slug":"whats-an-interrobang","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/whats-an-interrobang\/","title":{"rendered":"What’s an interrobang?"},"content":{"rendered":"

An interrobang<\/em> is a little-used punctuation mark that is a cross between a question mark (?) and an exclamation mark (!). As this suggests, the interrobang is designed to be used to punctuate sentences that are a combination of question and exclamation. Sometimes this is interpreted to mean a rhetorical question (a question for which no answer is required), but the interrobang is better suited to statements conveying incredulity or amazement.\u00a0 Examples of such usage are “You paid how much<\/span> for those shoes?”, and “They promoted him?”.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Interrobang\"The interrobang was ‘invented’ by Martin K Speckter, the head of an advertising agency, who felt that it would be nice to have a standard typographic symbol for punctuating statements where neither the question nor an exclamation alone exactly served the writer (the practice prevailing at the time was to use typographically cumbersome and unattractive combinations of the question mark and exclamation mark to achieve this effect).\u00a0 He chose the name to reference the punctuation marks that inspired it: interrogatio<\/em> is Latin for “a rhetorical question” or “cross-examination”; bang<\/em> is printers’ slang for the exclamation point.<\/p>\n

Microsoft provides several versions of the interrobang character as part of the Wingdings 2<\/strong> character set (on the }<\/strong>\/]<\/strong> and ~<\/strong>\/`<\/strong> keys) available with Microsoft Office. The interrobang was accepted into Unicode<\/strong> and is present in several fonts, including Lucida Sans Unicode<\/strong>, Arial Unicode MS<\/strong>, and Calibri<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

I like the interrobang. I feel it fits well with the overall tone of this blog, where I’m often writing about things that make me exclaim “What the f*ck?”\u00a0The fact that it is not widely used simply adds to the attraction.<\/p>\n

The full title of this weblog is “interrobang (?)”.\u00a0 This is a reference to Frank Zappa’s classic album Apostrophe (‘)<\/em>. See, nothing is random!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An interrobang is a little-used punctuation mark that is a cross between a question mark (?) and an exclamation mark (!). As this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-93","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/93","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/93\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1678,"href":"https:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/93\/revisions\/1678"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}