JC
OK. This may only be exciting to me, but I just needed to share. My brother, Dave, the fabulous graphic designer, just introduced me to the interrobang. Not only is it exciting to me because it’s a MIXED punctuation mark ;), but also because I always use question marks and exclamation marks together!?! SEE!?!

American Martin K. Speckter concocted the interrobang itself in 1962. As the head of an advertising agency, Speckter believed that ads would look better if advertising copywriters conveyed surprised queries using a single mark. He proposed the interrobang concept in an article in the magazine TYPEtalks. Speckter solicited possible names for the new character from readers. Contenders included ‘rhet’, ‘exclarotive’, and ‘exclamaquest’, but he settled on ‘interrobang’.

Speckter chose the name to reference the punctuation marks that inspired it. ‘Interrogatio’ is Latin for ‘question’ or ‘query’; ‘bang’ is printers’ slang for ‘exclamation point’.

In 1966, Richard Isbell of American Type Founders issued the Americana typeface and included the interrobang as one of the characters. In 1968, an interrobang key was available on some Remington typewriters. During the 1970s, it was possible to buy replacement interrobang keycaps and strikers for some Smith-Corona typewriters. The interrobang was in vogue for much of the 1960s, with the word ‘interrobang’ appearing in some dictionaries and the mark itself being featured in magazine and newspaper articles.

The interrobang failed to amount to more than a fad, however, never becoming a standard punctuation mark. Although most fonts don’t include the interrobang, it has not disappeared: Microsoft provides several versions of the interrobang character as part of the Wingdings 2 character set available with Microsoft Office. It was accepted into Unicode and is present in the fonts Lucida Sans Unicode and Arial Unicode MS, among others.

Notice that this isn’t really filed under any of our categories…ahem…I guess because it doesn’t really fit…if only there was a category titled “useless to everyone except for Jen.”