Introducing The INTERROBANG

I know, I know. Many of you right now are looking at this and going . . . "wtf?" It's a "P" with a point under it or maybe a D that's been caught in a lazy breeze. What's an "interrobang?"

Well, I found this today on (of all places) Wikipedia, and, this being my 50th blog post and all, I thought that the story and usage of the interrobang would be a good jumping-on place for something that I've been wondering about how to post on for awhile now.

Consider what follows a mixture of an amateur course in literary theory, typography, and contemporary society:

Irony is a problem. There are two types of irony that I'm concerned with here: situational irony and verbal irony. Situational irony is, as defined by Wikipedia, "a discrepancy between the expected result and actual results when enlivened by 'perverse appropriateness'." The key there is a discrepancy between the way things are and the way they are intended to be. An example of irony would be a college class that is devoted to teaching students why they shouldn't be in college. Verbal irony is when you say something that you don't mean. Someone saying "Yeah. . . . your new shoes are awesome!" when they are being sarcastic about it is an example of verbal irony.

The problem of irony (to me and many others) is how do you tell the difference between someone writing "Yeah . . . your new shoes are awesome!" when really mean it and "Yeah . . . your new shoes are awesome!" when they are being sarcastic. It's all in the context, but in a world of buzz clips and thirty-second news headlines context has been all but dropped from the program.

The solution to the problem? I give you (see above) the interrobang!

The interrobang is not really a new thing. Typographically, it's been around for years apparently, but I had never seen it before today. It's fantastic. It's a combination of a question mark (typographically, an interrogative mark) and an exclamation point (typographically known as a bang), hence interrobang.

The complication, of course, is that you've never heard of the interrobang before. In handwriting, it is obviously easy to write out but the interrobang isn't included (for now) on the character map in Windows, so including it in your instant messenger and email conversations is pretty much impossible but luckily though many people online have started looking to the close captioning system that deaf or hearing impaired television viewers use as a sound proxy for a solution. It seems that when something is spoken ironically by a character, the cc system punctuates the sentence with a "(!)" to denote the irony.

So, if you're a smart aleck, and you want to be very clear about what you are saying and you are saying it, I suggest using either the interrobang or, until it is embraced by the world, the (!).

Update - I forgot to source this before, but you can find supplemental information at Wikipedia or at this interesting little site too. Also, you apparently can access 4 different varieties of interrobangs in the Wingdings2 font of any Microsoft Office program by striking the "~" "^" "}" or "_" keys.