A quick hurrah for my favourite typographic glyph, the interrobang.

Introduced by Martin K Speckter in 1962, it was an attempt to condense the overactive punctuation of incredulous sentences such as “You drank how much?!”. Although it never really caught on, it still has some support in modern Unicode and can be used in HTML: ‽

Although I love the quirky idea, part of me is glad it remains a typographic and grammatical curiosity. If it had actually been successful, there might have been confusing repercussions for chess notation. ! and ? are used to denote good and bad moves respectively, leading to more complex derivatives:

14. Nc4!? is interesting move, but one that is perhaps a little speculative
14. Nc4?! is a questionable move, but one that still has some vague promise

In the world of the interrobang, might this subtle distinction have been lost forever‽

More about the interrobang