What is an Interrobang‽

So who invented the Interrobang, and why?

1962 was a truly mo­ment­ous year in the USA.

John Glenn be­came the first Amer­ican, and only the second hu­man, to reach or­bit; unforgettably, the Kennedy ad­min­is­tra­tion suc­cess­fully ne­go­ti­ated the nuc­lear tightrope of the Cuban mis­sile crisis, tak­ing the world within a hair’s breadth of nuc­lear war in the pro­cess; and NASA launched the world’s first tele­com­mu­nic­a­tions satel­lite, ush­er­ing in a new era of in­stant­an­eous global com­mu­nic­a­tions.

Con­sumer so­ci­ety too was reach­ing new heights: ad­vert­ising ruled, and the advertising agencies were springing up everywhere and ideas were burgeoning.

Anyway, one par­tic­u­lar New York ad exec turned his at­ten­tion to lofty mat­ters. Mar­tin K. Speck­ter (pictured left) was the head of his own New York ad­vert­ising agency with no less than the Wall Street Journal ac­count on his books.

He was a keen hob­by­ist ty­po­grapher, he also ed­ited Type Talks, a bi­monthly journal pub­lished by the Ad­vert­ising Ty­po­graph­ers As­so­ci­ation of Amer­ica which explored the use of type in ad­vert­ising.   He grew frus­trated with the increasing tend­ency of copy­writers to com­bine the ex­clam­a­tion mark and ques­tion mark to yield a sur­prised or rhet­or­ical ques­tion, for example:  “Who would punc­tu­ate a sen­tence like that?!”

So Speck­ter penned an art­icle for Type Talks to of­fer a solu­tion. ‘Mak­ing a new point, or, how about that…’ ap­peared in the March-April 1962 is­sue and ar­gued that there was a need for a single punc­tu­ation mark to re­place the ugly, jury-rigged con­struc­tion of a question mark followed by an exclamation mark.

As the art­icle went on to ex­plain, this pu­tat­ive sym­bol was in­ten­ded to con­vey a very par­tic­u­lar mix­ture of sur­prise and doubt:

To this day, we don’t know ex­actly what Colum­bus had in mind when he shouted ‘Land, ho.’ Most his­tor­i­ans in­sist that he cried, ‘Land, ho!’ but there are oth­ers who claim it was really ‘Land ho?’.  Chances are the in­trepid Columbus was both ex­cited and doubt­ful, but neither at that time did we, nor even yet, do we, have a point which clearly com­bines and melds in­ter­rog­a­tion with ex­clam­a­tion.  So we need an interrobang here.

Present­ing a set of spec­u­lat­ive designs for his cre­ation, rendered by his agency’s art dir­ector Jack Lipton, Speck­ter tent­at­ively named the new mark the ‘Exclamaquest’ or ‘In­ter­ro­b­ang’.

Here are the “tentative” designs that Jack Lipton created.

He ended the art­icle with an in­vit­a­tion to “Join the ex­al­ted ranks of Al­dus, Bodoni et al” by call­ing for read­ers to sup­ply their own in­ter­pret­a­tions of the sym­bol’s design, and so­li­cited new names to com­pare with his own sug­ges­tions.

There are other designs that were then offered as the new “interrobang”.  I wonder what you think of any of these describes the interrobang adquately for you.? I rather like Frank Davies’s effort.

So in 1962 Mr. Speckter developed the Interrobang, which has since recognized by several dictionaries and even some type and typewriter companies.  In the end, mir­ror­ing the pop­ular­ity of Speck­ter’s own term ‘In­ter­ro­b­ang’ over the other sug­ges­tions for its name, his simple su­per­pos­i­tion of a ques­tion and ex­clam­a­tion mark (like this: ‘‽’) would pre­vail, be­com­ing the model for most fu­ture in­ter­pret­a­tions of the sym­bol.

In 1968 Re­m­ing­ton Rand, a prom­in­ent type­writer man­u­fac­turer, had an an­nounce­ment to make:  “Re­m­ing­ton Rand of­fers the new punc­tu­ation mark, the
In­terrobang (a com­bin­a­tion of ? and !), as a spe­cial type face for its Model 25 Elec­trics.”  The brev­ity of this re­port be­lied its sig­ni­fic­ance. The In­ter­ro­b­ang’s path had been cleared all the way from the writer’s desk to the print­ing presses, and a new wave of en­thu­si­asm for the In­ter­ro­b­ang was in the off­ing.

The thing I can’t believe is how they pronounce this word – here it is on You Tube.

I think it should be In- terro-(rhymes with ferro)-bang, but it’s not my call!

So anyhow, how does one use an Interrobang?

 The mark is said to be the typographical equivalent of a grimace or a shrug of the shoulders. It applied solely to the rhetorical, Mr. Speckter said, when a writer wished to convey incredulity.

For example, the Interrobang would be used in an expression like this: ”You call that a hat?” with the interrobang replacing the humble (and less excited) question mark.

If you want to read about where in publishing the Interrobang has been used, I suggest you read the articles both by Shady Characters – a fascinating blog about such topics. Here’s Shady Characters’ first article, and second article.