
Interrobang - sndean
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/interrobang/
======
ademarre
I don't have a strong opinion on the interrobang either way, but let's imagine
we wanted to start a campaign for it to go mainstream.

The most important thing that could happen would be for a popular auto-correct
tool to start substituting it for '?!' and '!?'. MS Word would be ideal.

People would start to get familiar with it when reading other's works. And
when authoring, people tend to treat auto-correct like an authority and learn
from it. I suspect something similar happened with the ellipsis character in
place of three periods.

I have a hunch it would catch on easier in the non-English markets, which may
be slightly more accustomed to the inconvenience of using glyphs that aren't
always available on every keyboard.

Next, it needs to be included in mobile keyboards. I don't know about iOS, but
I can't find it in Gboard for Android.

We could start logging requests and submitting pull requests along those
lines.

Now we may not want a viral event. No hashtag campaigns, lest we awaken a
louder dissenting crowd. I think the Trojan Horse is a better strategy at
first.

~~~
blattimwind
> substituting it for '?!' and '!?'

But these aren't the same!?

~~~
lifthrasiir
I think the interrobang or its alikes have different functions in written
languages and spoken languages. In written languages they all are just a grab
bag of mixed-mode reactions including surprise or rhetorical questions. In
spoken languages (or corresponding transcripts), I found a distinction between
!? and ?! is valuable because there is temporality not usually represented in
written languages, and would avoid ‽ for the same reason. Likewise I argue
that the number of dots in ellipses is meaningless in written languages
(henceforth "standardized" to three dots) but can be actually meaningful in
spoken languages.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
How do you speak a 4-dotted ellipsis differently to a 3-dotted one?!

~~~
blattimwind
It's ...... longer.

------
crazygringo
My problem with the interrobang, besides the fact it's unnecessary ("?!" does
just fine, the same way we don't need to replace "th" with "θ"), is that it's
_so damned ugly_ and _hard to distinguish_.

The counter [1] -- the open space between the vertical bar and the question
mark curve -- is just too cramped ("‽"), so it's aesthetically unbalanced at
large sizes, and just looks like a question mark with an accidental smudge at
small sizes. It just doesn't "fit in" with any of the other glyphs of the
alphabet, it's badly designed.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter_(typography)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter_\(typography\))

~~~
carapace
FWIW, Replacing "th" with "θ" would really be a "re-placement": Theta and the
"voiced dental fricative"[1] were smeared together in Old English long ago.[2]

I.e. "there" and "theater" are two different "th"'s.[3]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_dental_fricative](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_dental_fricative)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th_(digraph)#Voiced_fricative_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th_\(digraph\)#Voiced_fricative_/%C3%B0/)

[3] English speakers: if you pay attention to how you speak those two words
you'll notice that your tongue is doing different things to make those two
"th" sounds. This is a weird "archaeo-linguistic" holdover in your "motor-
culture". In a certain sense, "you" always knew this but didn't know you knew.

~~~
lemoncucumber
Similarly, there's no letter for the voiced palato-alveolar fricative in
English (and as I recall it's actually one of the newest sounds that is part
of English). It's the voiced version of the "sh" sound -- an example is the
"si" part of "vision".

~~~
BrandonM
Cyrillic uses Ж

------
pagutierrezn
Chess annotation symbols for moves
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_annotation_symbols](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_annotation_symbols)

?? (Blunder)

? (Mistake)

?! (Dubious move)

!? (Interesting move)

! (Good move)

‼ (Brilliant move)

~~~
macintux
I was just thinking that combining them took away my ability to express
different emotions depending on which came first, but my use is the opposite
of those.

To me, the first one is the immediate response, so a dubious move might look
exciting at first but then you realize its problematic aspect, so !? would be
the sequence.

------
combatentropy
Maybe it was because he chose the ugliest of all possibilities. Some of the
proposals were ingenious, the two marks combining into a new unity that still
retains features of its two parents. But he just laid one mark over the other.
It's muddled and mundane.

Anyway, we have a convenient convention that works with what we have: lay out
the sentence as a question, but end it with the exclamation point. Isn't that
a simple fix!

~~~
drewrv
Why can't we just use two punctuation marks?!

~~~
ithkuil
iies indeed, vuhii can't vvue dgust use tvuo gliiphs for sounds that are
"obvious" combinations of other sounds?

~~~
fyolnish
ies indeed vuhai can’t vee just use tvoo gliphs

Is a much more readable example I think.

------
drfuchs
The second paragraph of TFA mentions "ox-turn" line breaking (alternating
left-to-right and right-to-left lines), but unforgivably fails to mention
every typographer's favorite vocabulary word for this: "boustrophedonic".

~~~
kazinator
OMG, I just made the same comment!

[https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=17504267](https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=17504267)

------
computator
> _For thousands of years, in some written languages, there was no space
> between words. People were expected figure out sentences and clauses while
> reading aloud._

Really?!

Addingspacesbetweenwordsseemslikeanobviousthingtodo.

According to Wikipedia, spaces weren't added because:

(1) Free form of speech is so continuous, adding inaudible spaces to
manuscripts would have been considered illogical.

(2) At a time when ink and papyrus were quite costly, adding spaces would be
an unnecessary waste of such writing mediums.

(3) Typically, the reader of the text was a trained performer, who would have
already memorized the content and breaks of the script, so the scroll acted as
a cue sheet and did not require in-depth reading.

I'm not convinced by reason #1 because words are distinct even in speech. No
matter how fast or continuous your speech when you say, "The dog jumped",
everyone will agree that "dog" is a distinct thing, even if you're illiterate.
It seems quite logical to separate "dog" from the words before and after when
you write.

Reason #2 sounds barely believable. I'm thinking that #3 must have been the
main reason. Anyone have more insight?

~~~
hannasanarion
> I'm not convinced by reason #1 because words are distinct even in speech. No
> matter how fast or continuous your speech when you say, "The dog jumped",
> everyone will agree that "dog" is a distinct thing, even if you're
> illiterate. It seems quite logical to separate "dog" from the words before
> and after when you write.

Clearly you've never tried to learn a second language?

Word segmentation is a very difficult task for non-native speakers.
Segmentation failure is a common error in children learning for the first
time.

The word breaks are only obvious to you because you've had decades of daily
practice parsing them. Look at a speech stream as a waveform or spectrogram,
and they vanish: they are objectively not there.

~~~
computator
Since several people made the same point about word segmentation, I obviously
didn't express myself very well.

What I was trying to say is that, _assuming you speak the language_ , you will
recognize "dog" a separate ‘ thing’ in a sentence. If I point to a German
Shepherd asking what that is, anyone who speaks English can reply "dog". It
can't be shorter; it could be longer but then you're adding information ("big
dog").

Even illiterate people know "dog" as a distinct ‘ thing’. Since even spoken
words are distinct concepts, with a beginning and end, and having boundaries
(even if the speech waveform looks continuous), it seems natural to show the
boundaries (eg., by placing spaces) if you going to starting writing down the
words.

Well, we know the spaces weren't added in early writing, by why not?
Wikipedia's reason #1 is that adding inaudible spaces would be illogical. I'm
not convinced that _that_ was the main reason. The other reasons seem more
plausible.

~~~
shkkmo
Well, if showing the boundaries doesn't matter for native speakers in spoken
language, why would it be natural to assume that it is needed in written
language?

------
kazinator
> _Sometimes, this never-ending string of letters would execute what was
> called an ox-turn, first reading left to right, then switching to read back
> from right to left._

What a fail! Perfect opportunity missed to use the word "boustrophedon": and
in the matching historic context, too.

~~~
lostlogin
Having long palindromes would be super helpful in these awful documents.

~~~
kazinator
Could be. Note that the Greeks actually mirrored the individual letters in the
lines going the other way. So there is no ambiguity, as long as a line
contains some asymmetric characters; you know when your eyes have landed on a
right-left line, regardless of palindromes and such.

------
thanatos_dem
As a daily user of the interrobang, I’ve just gotta say, how awesome is this‽

For any aspiring interrobangers, one thing that helps make them easier to use
is to set up text replacements. I have replacements setup on my phone and
computers to replace “?!” and “!?” with “‽” automatically.

~~~
corobo
Honestly it looks too bold (as in, font weight) than the rest of the text.
Just realising I'm not a fan

~~~
Faaak
Are you not a fan of the font, or of the character ?

~~~
Sharlin
The rendition of the character in a specific typeface, most likely.

~~~
corobo
Yes this - it just looks out of place in every font I've ever seen it in

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hurpaDurpa
This would really make for a great exception operator, for one-liner exception
handling.

    
    
      (alert(null) ‽ console.log(error));
    

Better than:

    
    
      (x === null ? console.log(error) : alert(x));
    

EDIT: hey downvotes, let's play _funny /not funny_.

~~~
snarfy
I can't seem to find the ‽ key on my keyboard.

~~~
hurpaDurpa
Well, obviously, the compiler could also interpret the consecutive use of each
of the two distinct characters question mark (?) and exclamation point (!).
But it would _have_ to tolerate both options to remain convenient (?! and !?
have the same effect).

Meanwhile the interrobang (‽) would really be an Easter egg.

~~~
simcop2387
most languages wouldn't work properly with ?! as that could be already valid
(unary ! operator meaning not, and ? being used for the ternay operator). So
you can't distinguish between: foo ?!bar : baz and an interrobang like
operator. !? on the otherhand is likely to already be invalid and be parseable
as an interrobang since it wouldn't already be valid to have a ? immediately
following a ! in many languages. Having both work might be nice, but is likely
impracticle for backwards compatibility.

------
majos
Heh. A few years ago one of the items on UChicago's Scavenger Hunt list was
any UChicago library book containing an interrobang, used as intended, outside
of a discussion of punctuation. I looked for a few hours. Never found one.

------
BjoernKW
¡Why not go for the Spanish option? Indeed, there's an inverted variant: ⸘Do
Spanish speakers actually use that‽

~~~
ggambetta
We do use inverted opening marks, but I've never seen mismatched opening and
closing marks (until your comment!). Not sure if that's what you were asking,
though.

~~~
TremendousJudge
Also, if I were to use mismatched opening and closing marks, I'd invert the
order, question mark first and bang later

~~~
ggambetta
We do invert the order (I'd say "properly nest") of the symbols when we use
both interrogation and exclamation together, e.g. _¿¡qué!?_

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GuiA
Hervé Bazin , a French writer, proposed a few more:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuation#"Love_point"_and_s...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuation#"Love_point"_and_similar_marks)

~~~
jobigoud
Expressing sentiment succinctly in text. The precursors to emoticons and
emojis.

------
Stratoscope
Interrobang and Keming by Liz Crain:

[https://flic.kr/p/LTD9Cs](https://flic.kr/p/LTD9Cs)

[http://lizcrainceramics.com/](http://lizcrainceramics.com/)

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gremlinsinc
IT seems now, it's much easier to create lasting end marks, not exactly a
symbol, but for example if I end a post on reddit with /s everyone knows I
mean sarcasm (almost everyone).

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jobigoud
What would be the closest emoji to this? The face with one eyebrow raised?
It's a bit hard to make out.

(Ah, HN strips emoji away from comments).

[https://emojipedia.org/face-with-one-eyebrow-
raised/](https://emojipedia.org/face-with-one-eyebrow-raised/)

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garmaine
Is there a distinction between ?! and !?

To me there is a subtle difference, emphasizing the punctuation that comes
first.

If so, maybe we should just accept as standard using two punctuation and allow
context or intent to determine ordering.

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foxyv
All I want is a way to end a sentence sarcastically. "/s" is fine but it would
be neat if there were a character for it.

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jmmcd
The same people who like this kind of thing usually also like portmanteaux
(the lowest form of wordplay) and then offer it as evidence that they love
language.

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golergka
Strange that this article didn't even once mention the only 20th century
punctuation innovation that actually stuck :)

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slurple
Interrobang is such a suitable name, fun and slightly suggestive.

~~~
pssflops
I liked the other proposed name: Exclamaquest.

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swamp40
Drop the 'Interro' part if you want it to catch on. Just call it a 'Bang'.

~~~
dougmwne
There's already a bang, and it's quite popular!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclamation_mark#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclamation_mark#History)

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mrb
Can I use it‽

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kulu2002
Interesting article

