Listen & Learn Blog

Today is National Punctuation Day and I’d like to take the opportunity to introduce you to the interrobang.

Whilst it’s not technically included in National Punctuation Day’s celebration of “the lowly comma, correctly used quotation marks, and other proper uses of periods, semicolons, and the ever-mysterious ellipsis”, the interrobang is nonetheless useful and should be recognised.

So what exactly is it? Well, an interrobang is a nonstandard English punctuation mark mark that combines the exclamation mark (!) and the question mark (?).

When you’re asking a question that’s also an exclamation (or vice versa), you would normally place both exclamation and question marks at the end – “What is that?!” for example. With the interrobang however, you get both in one.

This clever idea was thought up in 1962 by American ad agency director Martin K. Speckter, although sadly it’s never become part of standard English punctuation. The name comes from the Latin for “query” (interrogatio) and printer jargon for the exclamation mark (bang).

It’s easy enough to handwrite, although in my writing it comes out looking more like a poorly scribed question mark. If you’re typing, MS Word has the symbol in Wingdings, and some word processors support it with the shortcut Alt+8253.

Enjoy National Punctuation Day, and don’t forget to try out the interrobang!

Are you always getting in to fights about which word is more popular? Then there are a couple of websites for you!

The first is Googlefight, where you put in two words and stick people have a short fight, before one is announced the winner. A graph then appears showing how many hits each word has. You can do this with any set of words – listen and learn for example (learn wins!). The site is also offered in French and Romanian. So if you’re learning either of those two languages and are wondering which word is more popular, then try Googlefight. Amusing and educational!

Another site that’s similar is Twitter Tussle. Instead of stick people, Twitter Tussle has two birds tussling it out to show which word has the most TPM (tweets per minute). Listen is the winner here! As Twitter is used in many different languages, it is more wide-ranging than Googlefight – I put in “hablo” and “espanol” for example.

Although I can’t see too much benefit of these sites in terms of language learning, they are certainly an amusing distraction!