interrowhat‽

I love type. I especially enjoy looking through the individual characters and punctuation and seeing how differently they can be rendered from type family to family.  I also love old typewriters and the romanticism they invoke of an era long gone by.  So when I discovered this mark used to be a key on a machine that I held dear to me, I at once had to learn more about this mysterious thing called… the interrobang.

The interrobang is a mark that combines the exclamation point and a question mark into one individual mark.  It is used to emphasize a rhetorical statement or to show surprise.  And being an advocate for precise and succinct communication, wouldn’t it be more adept and aesthetically pleasing to get your point across by combining the two marks into a wonderful, singular mark?  Apparently I am not the only one who feels this way and nearly 50 years ago this mark made its first appearance.

The interrobang was created in 1962 by Martin K. Speckter who used the mark in an article for TYPEtalks Magazine in order to fill a gap in the system where writers often used cumbersome and unattractive combinations of the question and exclamation marks. (!?!?!?!?) Soon after, the Wall Street Journal ran an article using it. Talk shows were discussing the craze of the newest punctuation mark in the English language. And in 1968, Remington included the mark on its typewriters.  But alas, as all fads go, the interrobang never caught on as a standard mark in modern day typesetting to the dismay of many including myself.

How did this mark get its name?  ”Interro” is short for the interrogation point, which is another name for a question mark.  And “bang” was printer’s slang for an exclamation point.  Although the interrobang is not in modern punctuation — or on our keyboards — some typefaces do include a glyph for the interrobang character. Perhaps it is poetic that the typewriter and interrobang fell out of fashion at nearly the same time… poetic for me anyway. ‽

By: Andrea Colón