12 ms·
Interrobang
- drfuchs 8y agoThe second paragraph of TFA mentions "ox-turn" line breaking (alternating left-to-right and right-to-left lines), but unforgivably fails to mention every typographer's favorite vocabulary word for this: "boustrophedonic".
- kazinator 8y agoOMG, I just made the same comment! https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=17504267 https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=17504267
- GuiA 8y agoHervé Bazin , a French writer, proposed a few more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuation#"Love_point"_and_similar_marks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuation#"Love_point"_and_s...
- jobigoud 8y agoExpressing sentiment succinctly in text. The precursors to emoticons and emojis.
- hurpaDurpa 8y agoThis would really make for a great exception operator, for one-liner exception handling. (alert(null) ‽ console.log(error)); Better than: (x === null ? console.log(error) : alert(x)); EDIT: hey downvotes, let's play funny/not funny.
- Jarred 8y agoalternatively: // Would run console.error with the Error object (alert(x) ?: console.error);
- lifthrasiir 8y agoThis is indeed a form supported by GNU C extension [1] (but `?:` is not a single token, so `? :` is permitted). [1] https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Conditionals.html#Conditionals https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Conditionals.html#Conditi...
- azernik 8y agoYou may know this, but others may not: this is an actual thing, and is called the Elvis Operator (think the hair). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvis_operator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvis_operator Shockingly, this is actually accepted by GCC's C dialect! And PHP! By the simple implementation expedient of making the second operand of the ternary operator optional.
- snarfy 8y agoI can't seem to find the ‽ key on my keyboard.
- hurpaDurpa 8y agoWell, obviously, the compiler could also interpret the consecutive use of each of the two distinct characters question mark (?) and exclamation point (!). But it would have to tolerate both options to remain convenient (?! and !? have the same effect). Meanwhile the interrobang (‽) would really be an Easter egg.
- simcop2387 8y agomost languages wouldn't work properly with ?! as that could be already valid (unary ! operator meaning not, and ? being used for the ternay operator). So you can't distinguish between: foo ?!bar : baz and an interrobang like operator. !? on the otherhand is likely to already be invalid and be parseable as an interrobang since it wouldn't already be valid to have a ? immediately following a ! in many languages. Having both work might be nice, but is likely impracticle for backwards compatibility.
- empath75 8y agoWith ligatures you can just use ?! and make it look that way.
- opnitro 8y agoRacket doesn't seem to mind using λ despite it not being on the keyboard. I find it more convenient to remember a hotkey than to type `lambda`
- taneq 8y agoYou can't‽ But it's right there‽
- ars 8y agoAPL would like to have a word: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(codepage) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(codepage)
- justinator 8y agoDo you really want to give Larry Wall any more ideas‽
- Stratoscope 8y agoInterrobang and Keming by Liz Crain: https://flic.kr/p/LTD9Cs https://flic.kr/p/LTD9Cs http://lizcrainceramics.com/ http://lizcrainceramics.com/
- kazinator 8y ago> Sometimes, this never-ending string of letters would execute what was called an ox-turn, first reading left to right, then switching to read back from right to left. What a fail! Perfect opportunity missed to use the word "boustrophedon": and in the matching historic context, too.
- lostlogin 8y agoHaving long palindromes would be super helpful in these awful documents.
- kazinator 8y agoCould be. Note that the Greeks actually mirrored the individual letters in the lines going the other way. So there is no ambiguity, as long as a line contains some asymmetric characters; you know when your eyes have landed on a right-left line, regardless of palindromes and such.
- pagutierrezn 8y agoChess annotation symbols for moves https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_annotation_symbols https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_annotation_symbols ?? (Blunder) ? (Mistake) ?! (Dubious move) !? (Interesting move) ! (Good move) ‼ (Brilliant move)
- macintux 8y agoI was just thinking that combining them took away my ability to express different emotions depending on which came first, but my use is the opposite of those. To me, the first one is the immediate response, so a dubious move might look exciting at first but then you realize its problematic aspect, so !? would be the sequence.
- majos 8y agoHeh. A few years ago one of the items on UChicago's Scavenger Hunt list was any UChicago library book containing an interrobang, used as intended, outside of a discussion of punctuation. I looked for a few hours. Never found one.
- ademarre 8y agoI don't have a strong opinion on the interrobang either way, but let's imagine we wanted to start a campaign for it to go mainstream. The most important thing that could happen would be for a popular auto-correct tool to start substituting it for '?!' and '!?'. MS Word would be ideal. People would start to get familiar with it when reading other's works. And when authoring, people tend to treat auto-correct like an authority and learn from it. I suspect something similar happened with the ellipsis character in place of three periods. I have a hunch it would catch on easier in the non-English markets, which may be slightly more accustomed to the inconvenience of using glyphs that aren't always available on every keyboard. Next, it needs to be included in mobile keyboards. I don't know about iOS, but I can't find it in Gboard for Android. We could start logging requests and submitting pull requests along those lines. Now we may not want a viral event. No hashtag campaigns, lest we awaken a louder dissenting crowd. I think the Trojan Horse is a better strategy at first.
- josephpmay 8y agoMicrosoft word‽ Surly this campaign would be more successful if it started with autocorrect on phones.
- ademarre 8y agoThat's a good point! But wouldn't we need better mobile keyboard support before that happens?
- Symbiote 8y agoThe default keyboard on my Sony Xperia… something can already type a fair number of characters, but I don't think most people discover them. These are all accessed by holding down keys on the number/punctuation view: ¢ ¯ — – ≈ ≠ ± ‡ † ‰ ÷ × « » ½ ¼ ⅛ ⅓ ⅔ ¾ ⅜ ² ³ ⁴ ⅝ ⁿ ⅞ • … ¿ ¡ They're not very discoverable like that. Some are repeated, but these ones are on the second page of punctuation: § ¶ ° ¬ ~ © ® | ¦ I'm missing ‽ and a subscript 2 so I can write CO2 properly.
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- combatentropy 8y agoMaybe it was because he chose the ugliest of all possibilities. Some of the proposals were ingenious, the two marks combining into a new unity that still retains features of its two parents. But he just laid one mark over the other. It's muddled and mundane. Anyway, we have a convenient convention that works with what we have: lay out the sentence as a question, but end it with the exclamation point. Isn't that a simple fix!
- Grumbledour 8y agoYeah, I am with you on that one. I find the symbol at a glance really hard to distinguish from a normal question mark. I do feel there could be a need for the interobang, but it should also stand out more and many of the other suggestions look much more distinct.
- drewrv 8y agoWhy can't we just use two punctuation marks?!
- ithkuil 8y agoiies indeed, vuhii can't vvue dgust use tvuo gliiphs for sounds that are "obvious" combinations of other sounds?
- fyolnish 8y agoies indeed vuhai can’t vee just use tvoo gliphs Is a much more readable example I think.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- hannasanarion 8y agoYou don't need to invent new ones, English already has plenty of digraphs: gh, sh, ou, ie, ei, ae, oa, th, ng, gn, wh, ch, ph, kn, tch, ough, ti, zg, ci, wr, and qu.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- mrb 8y agoCan I use it‽
- slurple 8y agoInterrobang is such a suitable name, fun and slightly suggestive.
- pssflops 8y agoI liked the other proposed name: Exclamaquest.
- thanatos_dem 8y agoAs a daily user of the interrobang, I’ve just gotta say, how awesome is this‽ For any aspiring interrobangers, one thing that helps make them easier to use is to set up text replacements. I have replacements setup on my phone and computers to replace “?!” and “!?” with “‽” automatically.
- jobigoud 8y agoFor me "!?" means astonishment to the point of questioning, like "WTF!?", whereas "?!" is questioning emphasis, as if a meta exclamation would be applied to the entire question before it. "What are you gonna do now?!"
- falcor84 8y agoI usually consider them as applied one after the other: ?! is about first questioning and then usually being angry. !? is about first having strong feelings and then questioning their origins. So for me WTF would usually be followed by ?! but maybe it's just me.
- kungtotte 8y agoWTF is an interesting case because it can express both versions. WTF?! with an emphasis on the question means you lack information about the subject, WTF!? with an emphasis on the exclamation means you know what occurred but you're expressing shock/outrage. E.g. the first version is "I don't know what just happened" and the second is "I can't believe what just happened". With an interrobang there's no way of expressing both versions.
- corobo 8y agoHonestly it looks too bold (as in, font weight) than the rest of the text. Just realising I'm not a fan
- Faaak 8y agoAre you not a fan of the font, or of the character ?
- BjoernKW 8y ago¡Why not go for the Spanish option? Indeed, there's an inverted variant: ⸘Do Spanish speakers actually use that‽
- ggambetta 8y agoWe do use inverted opening marks, but I've never seen mismatched opening and closing marks (until your comment!). Not sure if that's what you were asking, though.
- TremendousJudge 8y agoAlso, if I were to use mismatched opening and closing marks, I'd invert the order, question mark first and bang later
- ggambetta 8y agoWe do invert the order (I'd say "properly nest") of the symbols when we use both interrogation and exclamation together, e.g. ¿¡qué!?
- jobigoud 8y agoWhat would be the closest emoji to this? The face with one eyebrow raised? It's a bit hard to make out. (Ah, HN strips emoji away from comments). https://emojipedia.org/face-with-one-eyebrow-raised/ https://emojipedia.org/face-with-one-eyebrow-raised/
- computator 8y ago> For thousands of years, in some written languages, there was no space between words. People were expected figure out sentences and clauses while reading aloud. Really?! Addingspacesbetweenwordsseemslikeanobviousthingtodo. According to Wikipedia, spaces weren't added because: (1) Free form of speech is so continuous, adding inaudible spaces to manuscripts would have been considered illogical. (2) At a time when ink and papyrus were quite costly, adding spaces would be an unnecessary waste of such writing mediums. (3) Typically, the reader of the text was a trained performer, who would have already memorized the content and breaks of the script, so the scroll acted as a cue sheet and did not require in-depth reading. I'm not convinced by reason #1 because words are distinct even in speech. No matter how fast or continuous your speech when you say, "The dog jumped", everyone will agree that "dog" is a distinct thing, even if you're illiterate. It seems quite logical to separate "dog" from the words before and after when you write. Reason #2 sounds barely believable. I'm thinking that #3 must have been the main reason. Anyone have more insight?
- falcor84 8y ago>I'm not convinced by reason #1 because words are distinct even in speech. No matter how fast or continuous your speech when you say, "The dog jumped", everyone will agree that "dog" is a distinct thing, even if you're illiterate. Segmenting words is actually a quite complex cognitive task that takes a while to acquire, usually considered in the framework of statistical learning[0]. Another aspect here is that the concept of a word is somewhat fuzzy, with compound words[1] emerging quite naturally, particularly in some languages. For relatively recent examples of compounds in English, consider "website" and "cellphone" (both of which are now, as a separate step, gradually becoming the default meanings of "site" and "phone"). So I don't find it too surprising that once upon a time word segmentation was even more flexible. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_learning_in_language_acquisition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_learning_in_langua... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_(linguistics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_(linguistics)
- skummetmaelk 8y agoIf you listen to people speaking in a language you do not understand it can be _very_ hard to pick out the space between individual words. When learning a language your brain learns to artificially break up the almost continuous stream of sound into distinct words.
- kulu2002 8y agoInteresting article
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- golergka 8y agoStrange that this article didn't even once mention the only 20th century punctuation innovation that actually stuck :)
- gremlinsinc 8y agoIT seems now, it's much easier to create lasting end marks, not exactly a symbol, but for example if I end a post on reddit with /s everyone knows I mean sarcasm (almost everyone).
- jmmcd 8y agoThe same people who like this kind of thing usually also like portmanteaux (the lowest form of wordplay) and then offer it as evidence that they love language.
- crazygringo 8y agoMy problem with the interrobang, besides the fact it's unnecessary ("?!" does just fine, the same way we don't need to replace "th" with "θ"), is that it's so damned ugly and hard to distinguish. The counter [1] -- the open space between the vertical bar and the question mark curve -- is just too cramped ("‽"), so it's aesthetically unbalanced at large sizes, and just looks like a question mark with an accidental smudge at small sizes. It just doesn't "fit in" with any of the other glyphs of the alphabet, it's badly designed. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter_(typography) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter_(typography)
- carapace 8y agoFWIW, Replacing "th" with "θ" would really be a "re-placement": Theta and the "voiced dental fricative"[1] were smeared together in Old English long ago.[2] I.e. "there" and "theater" are two different "th"'s.[3] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_dental_fricative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_dental_fricative [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th_(digraph)#Voiced_fricative_/%C3%B0/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th_(digraph)#Voiced_fricative_... [3] English speakers: if you pay attention to how you speak those two words you'll notice that your tongue is doing different things to make those two "th" sounds. This is a weird "archaeo-linguistic" holdover in your "motor-culture". In a certain sense, "you" always knew this but didn't know you knew.
- lemoncucumber 8y agoSimilarly, there's no letter for the voiced palato-alveolar fricative in English (and as I recall it's actually one of the newest sounds that is part of English). It's the voiced version of the "sh" sound -- an example is the "si" part of "vision".
- BrandonM 8y agoCyrillic uses Ж
- shemtay 8y agoI can't think of any pair of English words that are distinguished by a voiced vs unvoiced dental fricative at the same location, c.f. 'sue' and 'zoo'. Does any such pair exist?
- swamp40 8y agoDrop the 'Interro' part if you want it to catch on. Just call it a 'Bang'.
- dougmwne 8y agoThere's already a bang, and it's quite popular! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclamation_mark#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclamation_mark#History
- RandallBrown 8y ago! is already 'Bang'
- garmaine 8y agoIs there a distinction between ?! and !? To me there is a subtle difference, emphasizing the punctuation that comes first. If so, maybe we should just accept as standard using two punctuation and allow context or intent to determine ordering.
- foxyv 8y agoAll I want is a way to end a sentence sarcastically. "/s" is fine but it would be neat if there were a character for it.