Interrobang‽
So, a gratifying number of you knew what the punctuation mark was, and only one of you couldn't see it.
For those of you who didn't know what it was, it's an interrobang. The thing is, strict grammarians frown on multiple punctuation at the end of a sentence, as in "What the hell is going on here?!" Less so than they used to, but still. Anyway, in 1962, a guy named Martin K. Speckter, an ad executive and type geek, invented the interrobang to shut those punctilious jerks (of which he himself was one) up.
It hasn't gained much traction outside of type geeks. It is generally felt that although "?!" is bad, using an unfamiliar punctuation mark is worse, from a "type should be invisible" philosophical standpoint.
But the unicode standard is driven by type geeks. So the interrobang is included in the standard. It's just a question of whether your OS, browser, and particular font all fully support the standard. (and really, no font is expected to fully support unicode. There are mechanisms in unicode to substitute glyphs from other fonts to display mixed language text) Many unicode fonts that do support the interrobang do so by overlaying the ! and ?; very few typographers design a separate interrobang glyph.
(originally posted to on dreamwidth. I'd like to keep all my comments in one place, so please comment there by creating an openID cross-site login.)
For those of you who didn't know what it was, it's an interrobang. The thing is, strict grammarians frown on multiple punctuation at the end of a sentence, as in "What the hell is going on here?!" Less so than they used to, but still. Anyway, in 1962, a guy named Martin K. Speckter, an ad executive and type geek, invented the interrobang to shut those punctilious jerks (of which he himself was one) up.
It hasn't gained much traction outside of type geeks. It is generally felt that although "?!" is bad, using an unfamiliar punctuation mark is worse, from a "type should be invisible" philosophical standpoint.
But the unicode standard is driven by type geeks. So the interrobang is included in the standard. It's just a question of whether your OS, browser, and particular font all fully support the standard. (and really, no font is expected to fully support unicode. There are mechanisms in unicode to substitute glyphs from other fonts to display mixed language text) Many unicode fonts that do support the interrobang do so by overlaying the ! and ?; very few typographers design a separate interrobang glyph.
(originally posted to on dreamwidth. I'd like to keep all my comments in one place, so please comment there by creating an openID cross-site login.)