Recently, I’ve been listening to GrammarGirl’s “Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing”. I’ve generally found the episodes to be very interesting, and even though I thought I knew some of the subjects well, I’ve definitely learned something each time. I’d highly recommend giving it a listen.

However, in one of her recent episodes which discussed punctuating questions, she mentioned something that really mystified me: The Interrobang. I’ll quote her explanation below:

GrammarGirl said:
And finally, when you’re asking a question in surprise such as What? it isn’t appropriate to use multiple question marks or a question mark with an exclamation point. You’re supposed to pick the terminal punctuation mark that is most appropriate and use just one (1). Is your statement more of a question or more of an outburst?

I’ve always found that solution unsatisfactory, so I was thrilled to learn that there’s an obscure punctuation mark that was designed exclusively for asking questions in a surprised manner. It’s called an interrobang, and it looks like an exclamation point superimposed on a question mark.

You shouldn’t use the interrobang in formal writing, but I think it would be great if people started using it on blogs and in other informal communications. If you have the Wingdings 2 font in your word processing program, you can insert an interrobang as a special character, and there are unicode values that you can use to add the interrobang to your web site. I’ve put those in the transcript of this episode.

Although it’s a rather cool looking symbol, I think it’s a rather silly idea, and demonstrates one of the most frustrating aspects of prescriptive grammar.

So, the interrobang exists for a very distinct reason: Sometimes, you want to express that you’re surprised as you ask a given question, but you can’t use two punctuation marks at the end of a sentence.

My first thought when I read that was “How have I never heard of that rule?!”

…wait. Something’s wrong. I just used two punctuation marks at the end of a sentence. And… everything’s OK. The reader understood me, understood that the question carried a note of surprise, and most importantly, the English language didn’t collapse in on itself or explode in a blaze of punctuational pyrotechnics. That must mean that the inability to end a sentence with two punctuation marks isn’t a natural, grammatical rule (like “I have walked” versus “I have walk”), but instead, is an arbitrary, stylistic rule.

So, basically, the Interrobang was created because an arbitrary, stylistic rule has forbidden what most people normally do to indicate a surprised question, the “?!” cluster. They’ve broken the language by disallowing the existing punctuation system, then created this new mark to bandage the wound they created. Am I the only person who sees this whole process as more than a little ridiculous?

Keep in mind, though, I’m not against all attempts at expanding our system of punctuation. I think that the Irony Mark might come in handy from time to time, and a sarcasm mark would be very useful for online communications.

However, the Interrobang strikes me as a cute, interesting, but ultimately unnecessary bit of novel punctuation. The interrobang is only necessary if we accept one particular bit of nitpicky stylistic dogma. When you couple its questionable reason for existence with the relative difficulty of finding and inserting the symbol compared to the simple “?!” cluster, it’s no wonder to me that it hasn’t caught on.

That’s not to say, however, that the interrobang is without it’s fans, who need to be represented as well. After forwarding the article to a friend of mine online, she responded with excitement to the idea:

Make sure you talk about the convenience of only one dot. I know you may be against it, but you must talk about both sides and be fair. A dot may not seem like a lot of time to someone, especially if you are particularly crafty with a pen. BUT think about if you are hyperbole happy. All the time you will save over the years. It’s really staggering.

So, although the interrobang has a future amongst hyperbole-happy minimalists and time-savers, the fact of the matter is that for the majority of people, the interrobang is never going to fly. You’re welcome to interrobang your writing to your heart’s content, but just don’t be surprised when your proofreading friend hands you back your essay with a big red circle around your interrobang, and a small note, scribbled in the margins, reading “What the heck is this?!”.

Tagged with Conventional Linguistics, Speech and Grammar Errors, Tirades |

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7 Comments so far
  1. Jangari July 27, 2007 11:08 pm

    I’ve often written sentences for which no punctuation mark is quite adequate, and in instances where putting two together looks and feels completely wrong. Specifically, I’ve often wanted to combine a question mark with a comma to create a semi-question, i.e., one that doesn’t quite end the sentence, the sentence continues after the semi-question and may or may not ultimately end in a question. I’m trying to think of an example, but it’s incredibly difficult.

    The combination ?, looks entirely inappropriate, whereas ?! to me looks and feels great! At the end of the day, I’m all for creating extra punctuation marks where supralexical meaning cannot be encoded into the narrow set we currently have (nor by combination of two or three of them), but I also agree that the interrobang is unnecessary; ?! will do fine.

  2. Nate True July 29, 2007 1:46 pm

    Wow, I didn’t know it had a name. I’d always called it the Exclaquestion Point - an admittedly silly name.

    I do, however, like to order the ? and ! according to whether the sentence is more of a question or more of an exclamation. The more relevant one comes first.

  3. marktristan July 31, 2007 6:06 am

    Of course something can be both a question and an exclamation. But I can’t imagine how something would be “more of an exclamation” and less a question (i.e. necessitating !? rather than ?!).

    Related to this topic: what do you think of the increasing use of smileys in informal communication?

    I use them sparingly but I think they’re great :)

  4. Maxwell July 31, 2007 6:54 am

    I agree with Nate True. I’m not quite sure how exactly I judge it, but my ordering may be in reference to whether the sentence is a question form (”what?!”, or with subject-verb inversion, for instance) or a normal sentence that, as a plain question, would simply be inflected (”he ate the cat!?”). I personally met the latter (!?) form first, so it seems much more aesthetic than “?!”, which seems inelegantly unbalanced if I stare at it for a while.

    I think its niftiness is identical to the niftiness one might feel, perhaps, in finding a single word for your mother’s husband’s son. My reaction is always that, for no reason whatsoever, it’s a great thing to be able to do something in a single unit over any other number of units (even so small as these). “Saudade”, by exaggerated example, is much more nifty than the whole paragraph defining it, though it’s the same thought. I feel the growing love for the interrobang is similar in source.

  5. schmendrick August 2, 2007 8:52 am

    I don’t agree at all it is a question and should be ended that way. If it were acceptable to use a set of punctuation ?! it would be taught in school. It seems to me as a attempt to complicate a language that is already a proverbial bear to learn anyhow.

  6. Dave Bath August 7, 2007 1:22 am

    It may be a hangover from parsing code, but I’ve often felt the need to match question marks like I do braces, indicating the start and end of a block. In notes for myself, and sometimes for others, I’ll use the spanish inverted question mark to open the question, even if the question as an aside ¿parenthetical" inside a sentence. I’m less tempted to use an upside down bang to introduce emphasis like ¡this!, but it does occasionally make sense. ¿Have English punctuation mavens ever raised this possibility? ¿Is this punctuation tendency common to those programming in languages like C (or even ¡lisp!)?

  7. LeV September 16, 2007 5:43 pm

    Those punctuation signs came into use as practical rhetorical devices. They were written horizontal first and marked the intonation, whether to raise (~), to drop (.) or to emphasis (-) the voice before pausing in a speech. They became grammatical devices later on. But still, there is a rhetorical/semantical function, as well as a formatting function. (Imagine reading a latin-codex from anno 800 with no spaces between words and no punctuation at all - this is kind of difficult, believe me!) I use !? and … the same as i use smilies/emoticons - for non-verbal semantic and/or poetical purposes. I do not use them excessively, but as a sensitive speaker. Written language lacks of non-verbal signs, this could result in misunderstanding, when using it for direct conversation. So i don’t understand insisting on the presciption of a language, rather than the description. It is not at all silly or wrong (in pragmatic view) to use the !?-cluster.

    @Jangari: I’ve often seen examples when an exclamation or question mark was used and the sentence continued, using minuskel to demonstrate the sign didn’t mark the end of the sentence. (Unfortunately, i just have german examples in mind.)

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