Greetings everybody!

I just wanted to let you all know that I’m going to be on sabbatical for a few weeks from making LingMystic posts. Between classes restarting and work, I’m not going to have much time, and I don’t like to just leave things silent.

As always, I’ll be available for emailing (contact link in the top right part of the page) and you’re still welcome to comment, but there just won’t be much new.

So, enjoy the end of your summer, and keep looking out for awesome language!

Recently, a reader pointed me to a post on The Repeal of Gravity Blog discussing the strangeness that can sometimes arise with expressions of relative dates (like “last Monday” or “last March”. He highlighted the troubles arising from using “last March” in April, which can often leave people wondering whether you mean the march that has just passed, or the previous one. Although I don’t have much to add to his discussion, it does remind me of an issue that often plagues my communication.

Nocturnolinguistics

I’m a bit of a night owl. It’s not at all unusual for me to be up and working, talking with friends online, or even posting on this site well after midnight, and often, that leaves me in an interesting situation linguistically.

Let’s say that it’s 1:30am on June 9th. I’m speaking with a friend online, and we decide that we’re going to make plans for 4:30pm on June 9th, the same day. Our plans are finalized, and finally, it’s time to say goodnight. So, not thinking, I say “OK, see you tomorrow at 4:30!”.

Often, my friend will just go along with it, confirm the time, and move on. However, I have some friends who are really tripped up by this. “Wait,” they’ll say, “We’ve got plans for 4:30pm today, right? We said the 9th, not the 10th.” After a bit of clarifying chat, all is well, but these minor miscommunications seem to highlight an interesting difference in perspective among different people.

For me (and some other people I talk with), “today” is defined by sleep. I think that “today”, means, roughly, “between now and when I go to sleep for the night”. As you would expect, “tomorrow” then refers to “after I’ve gone to sleep and gotten back up, but before I go back to sleep the next night”. Sounds a bit complicated, but it seems to work in practice.

Until I’ve woken up on the day of the event, it’s not “today” yet. Thus, if I’m still up at 3:30am and I’ve got a meeting at noon, that meeting is still “tomorrow” to me, as I’m planning to sleep before that meeting starts. However, if it’s 3:30am, and I’ve already slept for the night and just got up early, a noon meeting becomes “today”. This is a very relative sort of system, and although it works fine for me, it does seem to confuse some of my friends.

For other people, “tomorrow” is, quite literally, “the day that follows this one on the calendar”. So, the moment the clock strikes midnight, yesterday’s tomorrow becomes today, and today’s tomorrow is yesterday’s “day after tomorrow” (I love that sentence).

So, for these people, if a meeting happens in the same calendar day, it’s “today”. Even if they’re still awake from the prior day and it’s only 12:01am, a meeting at noon is “today”. These people will dutifully make the switch at midnight, and doing so seems perfectly natural.

With these two ways of looking at the usage of “today” and “tomorrow”, it can sometimes be difficult to bridge the gap, especially when you’re not sure what system the person you’re talking to prefers, but there are definitely ways around it.

As before, let’s say it’s 1:30am on Monday, June 9th, and I’m confirming an appointment at 4:30pm on Monday, June 9th. The absolute safest way to express it would be with a qualifying statement, for example, “I’ll see you today, June 9th, at 4:30pm”. However, this can be a bit official or stodgy sounding. Another way to get around the ambiguity would be to say “I’ll see you in 15 hours, at 4:30pm.” The most common phrasing I use is something like “I’ll see you tomorrow/today at 4:30pm”.

A Call to Comments

Even though there are ways around this ambiguity, the fact that people seem to use “today” and “tomorrow” differently is very interesting to me. Calling on the wonderful interactive power of the internet, I’d really appreciate if some readers would let me know which usages of “tomorrow” and “today” they tend to use in the wee hours of the morning, and whether that’s the same in any other languages they might speak. It’s a fascinating phenomenon, and I’m wondering how widespread these usages are.

So, please, leave your comments. Although I’ll be off to bed shortly, rest assured, I’ll have a look at them tomorrow morning… err, today? In 9 hours? Oh, screw it, I’ll just look at them Saturday. It’s much clearer that way.

Ahh, the joys of Linguistically Justified procrastination.

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?!”.