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Interrobang

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Re: Interrobang

#31

Post by function_seven »

ademarre wrote: post #18

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 a…

I think you nailed it. More than half of the em dashes and en dashes I type are a result of Word correcting a pair of hyphens in a row. I write "Foo--but not bar" and it renders “Foo—but not bar”. There are no curly quotes on my keyboard either, but any decently professional typesetting uses them of course.

Re: Interrobang

#32

Post by drewrv »

combatentropy wrote: post #19

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 sim…

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

Re: Interrobang

#33

Post by blattimwind »

ademarre wrote: post #18

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 a…

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

But these aren't the same!?

Re: Interrobang

#34

Post by wodenokoto »

ademarre wrote: post #18

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 a…

> but let's imagine we wanted to start a campaign for it to go mainstream.

I believe Reddit has tried it for years. Maybe they should have focused on auto correct.

Re: Interrobang

#35

Post by lifthrasiir »

blattimwind wrote: post #33
ademarre wrote: post #18

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 a…

> substituting it for '?!' and '!?' But these aren't the same!?

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.

Re: Interrobang

#37

Post by jobigoud »

thanatos_dem wrote: post #28

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.

For me "!?" means astonishment to the point of questioning, like "WTF!?", whereas "?!" is questioning emphasis, as if a meta exclamation would be applied to the entire question before it. "What are you gonna do now?!"

Re: Interrobang

#38

Post by jobigoud »

GuiA wrote: post #3

Hervé Bazin , a French writer, proposed a few more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuation#"Love_point"_and_s...

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

Re: Interrobang

#40

Post by 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?

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