I recently posted a great infographic about the ampersand. If you’re interested in punctuation, you’ll appreciate another article I found on 14 punctuation marks “you never knew existed”!
My favourite is probably the interrobang, as I’ve discussed previously. But I also really like the guillemets (<< >>), which are used in non-English languages as quotation marks. The translation of “guillemets” is “Little Williams” by the way!
Which is your favourite of the punctuation marks?
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 a stickler for correct punctuation? Do you appreciate a well-placed apostrophe? Then your day has come – it’s National Punctuation Day!
Now in its seventh official year of celebration, the holiday started when one man, Jeff Rubin, grew frustrated of spotting errors in his newspaper. The event has grown since then, with Rubin’s aim being more educational than correctional these days.
Rubin says he wanted to help educators remind students that punctuation still matters, even in an age of rapid-fire tweets and text messages.
“We are graduating children from high schools now who cannot read and cannot write,” he says. “When these kids get out into the real world, they’re going to be unemployable.” (Source: CNN)
The National Punctuation Day website features activities including “a recipe for meatloaf that can be sculpted to look like exclamation points and semicolons”. I hope it also includes instructions on how to use these correctly.
I recently posted a great infographic about the ampersand. If you’re interested in punctuation, you’ll appreciate another article I found on 14 punctuation marks “you never knew existed”!