This is an interrobang. It should have become a punctuation mark, but it never really caught on. Maybe it will in the future, but probably not. The keyboard is pretty well standardized by this point, and people seem happy enough to say, “He hooked up with Sheila?!?!??!”
I think about the interrobang a lot when I am thinking about the habit we have, as a species, of assuming that the world in which we live was entirely inevitable—that we as contemporary humans are just along for the ride. But the truth is we all make up the world together as we go. We choose ?! over the interrobang. I know it feels like someone else has made this decision for us, but the truth is that we are right now and all the time making the decision.
nah. i mean, to an extent.
but punctuation is an agreed-upon system around not only the nation but the world. someone (rather, several societies) did decide back in whenever that a ? was a questioning mark and a ! was an exclaiming mark.
we can’t really change that and still hope to make sense. unless we can get a huge population to agree, this isn’t going to end up on a keyboard.
but. look at what humanity does do with language. creating meaning out of words and spreading that across a spectrum is easier. rather than needing to draw and adopt a new symbol we just need to combine letters in a different way and apply meaning to how those letters are spoken. this happens everyday, everywhere.
i don’t think we should look at punctuation as a sign of humanity’s inability to be creative and change. i think we should look at our ever-changing languages as a sign of the opposite.
(via woodsward)
