Is This the Dawning of the Age of Interrobang‽

[caption id="attachment_127282" align="alignleft" width="281"] You see, I've turned the moon into what I like to call a "Death Star".[/caption]

The spoken word and text are like close siblings. They don’t see eye-to-eye on everything but are constantly borrowing stuff from each other.

When we want to highlight a word or phrase in speech as noteworthy or questionable in some way, we might use ‘air quotes’ (don't pretend you've never done it). That’s a writing device that we’ve pinched for speech.

But it works the other way too. Writers have invented – or, at least, tried to invent – new typographic elements to mimic what we are communicating with our speech. Let’s have a look at a few and what they can do for us.

Oh sure, we need to more punctuation

In GroundHog Day, TV weatherman, Phil Connors (Billy Murray) pitches this line to his viewing audience:

‘This is one time where television really fails to capture the true excitement of a large squirrel predicting the weather.’

Genius, but Murray’s delivery is so deadpan that he could almost be serious. We know he’s being insincere but how do you pick that up in the text?

In 2006, Douglas Sak proposed the ‘Sarcmark’ and still runs a project to promote its adoption. Plug-ins are available to provide the sarcmark on Wordpress and Windows but the campaign seems to have stalled ten years after it’s birth.

Though there is no official sarcmark built into the unicode set our computers use, there's a pretty close match for it built into the Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics block called 'Yi'. It has the HTML code of 'ᘒ' and looks like this:

ᘒ

ᘒ Regardless, I’m certain things will improve for the sarcmark campaign very soon.. ᘒ

Oh, the Irony

Irony is a difficult enough concept to explain and a number of attempts have been made to find a way to mark it in text passages. Options have included dashes, square braces and slashes, but the original – dating from the 1580s – probably still has the most traction.

English printer Henry Denham proposed a reversed question mark called a ‘percontation point’ which was used mainly for rhetorical question that don’t require answers.

The glyph is easy enough to find and use with two potential options available. You can go with the more crafted Arabic Question Mark (&amp#1567 - ؟) or you stick with the mare standard Reversed Question Mark (&amp#11822; - ⸮).

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by Alex Walker via SitePoint