Interrobang

Most punctuation has no author. The comma, the question mark, the ampersand all accumulated over centuries of scribes and printers, and nobody signed the work. This mark has a birth certificate. Martin K. Speckter (1915–1988), who ran a New York advertising agency, proposed it in the March–April 1962 issue of the trade magazine TYPEtalks, in a piece titled "Making a New Point, or, How About That…". His complaint was professional rather than aesthetic: ad copy kept reaching for both marks at once — the incredulous question that is also an exclamation — and writers were stacking "?!" at the end of a line, which read as a typing accident rather than a decision.

Speckter put the naming to his readers. Exclamaquest and exclarotive were among the losers. Interrobang won, from the Latin interrogatio for the questioning half and bang, old printers' slang for the exclamation mark, for the other. What makes it more than two marks in a row is that the shapes are overlaid rather than set side by side: one glyph doing both jobs, the question mark's hook riding the exclamation's stem down to a single shared dot.

It came closer to sticking than its reputation suggests. Richard Isbell cut it into Americana for American Type Founders in 1965. Remington offered an interrobang key on some typewriters in 1968, and Smith-Corona owners could swap in a replacement keycap through the 1970s. Then it stalled, for the reason invented punctuation always stalls — a mark the reader has to be taught is a mark most editors will not risk — and it spent two decades as a curiosity in type-specimen books.

Unicode ended the precarity in June 1993, in version 1.1, and it now ships in the system fonts of every desktop and phone you are likely to touch. Spanish-language typesetting got its matching opener much later: the inverted interrobang was encoded in 2008 to lead a sentence the way ¿ and ¡ do, and is occasionally called the gnaborretni, which is exactly the joke it looks like.

Getting one out of a keyboard is still the hard part, sixty years on. In Microsoft Word, type 203D and press Alt+X; on macOS, the Character Viewer at Control-Command-Space finds it by name. Which is roughly where Speckter left it — an idea everyone agrees is good, and almost nobody has within reach.