I 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.
I don't know if you've ever played with a font like FiraCode, but it gives you both fancy typographical symbols and compatibility with existing compilers by defining purely-visual translations between certain sequences of characters and purpose-built glyphs. So for example '!=' is rendered as '≠', '=>' as '⇒', '>=' as '≥', etc.
I think you nailed it. More than half of the em dashes and en dashes I type are a result of Word correcting a pair of hyphens in a row. I write "Foo--but not bar" and it renders “Foo—but not bar”. There are no curly quotes on my keyboard either, but any decently professional typesetting uses them of course.
My 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.
FWIW, 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]
[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.
Maybe 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!
Yeah, 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.
The 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".
> 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.
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?
> 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.
Clearly you've never tried to learn a second language?
Word segmentation is a very difficult task for non-native speakers. Segmentation failure is a common error in children learning for the first time.
The word breaks are only obvious to you because you've had decades of daily practice parsing them. Look at a speech stream as a waveform or spectrogram, and they vanish: they are objectively not there.
>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.
> I'm not convinced by reason #1 because words are distinct even in speech.
Not in all languages. Lookup "liaison" in French, e.g. (and a not uncommon complaint of people learning French is that they can't separate the words in spoken speech).
I'm not terrible at French and still struggle sometimes to discern the word breaks. Malapropisms in my native English can arise from that too. Learning a new language it can be v. hard to distinguish word breaks - our brain fills them in when we know a language, which is why it's hard to imagine that people might not agree that "dog" is separate.
Try saying "Hangdogears". Is it "hangdog ears" is it "hang dog ears" is it "hang dogears".
Reason #3 is not in itself a reason to forego spaces, just a reason why users would not insist on them. And no newsreader or actor today would prefer his cue cards or autocue without spaces.
I suspect a major reason not listed is inertia: people were used to reading without spaces between words, and never considered the alternative. With some help from reason #2, the increased cost.
Logical? Sure, most languages do separate words for this reason.
But languages are never completely logical. There are planty of writing systems where there are no breaks between words. Some of the ones I can think of includes Thai, Korean and Chinese.
>I'm not convinced by reason #1 because words are distinct even in speech.
Perhaps you only spend time around trained actors who enunciate their speech. Because let me tell to most people I know ramble their speech into one long string of sounds. Go listen to a recording of a language you know nothing about and tell me what the words are. Oh, and not a news cast, but everyday conversation between friends having a good time.
You speak English so you know it's "the dog jumped" and not "thud awgjumpt." But if you yell both of those quickly there's not any difference.
I can't really do much with the numbered options there but I'd just like to point out that Thai has no spaces between words. I know six year olds who can read Thai properly so I don't know about trained performers or whatever.
> 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.
As 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.
For 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?!"
Heh. 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.
We 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.
IT 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).
The 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.
[+] [-] ademarre|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] azernik|7 years ago|reply
I don't know if you've ever played with a font like FiraCode, but it gives you both fancy typographical symbols and compatibility with existing compilers by defining purely-visual translations between certain sequences of characters and purpose-built glyphs. So for example '!=' is rendered as '≠', '=>' as '⇒', '>=' as '≥', etc.
See https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode. They do go a bit overboard, IMO.
[+] [-] josephpmay|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] function_seven|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blattimwind|7 years ago|reply
But these aren't the same!?
[+] [-] wodenokoto|7 years ago|reply
I believe Reddit has tried it for years. Maybe they should have focused on auto correct.
[+] [-] pbhjpbhj|7 years ago|reply
Interesting the range of characters that are available in Gboard on my Android phone.
[+] [-] craftyguy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crazygringo|7 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] carapace|7 years ago|reply
I.e. "there" and "theater" are two different "th"'s.[3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_dental_fricative
[2] 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.
[+] [-] unhammer|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pagutierrezn|7 years ago|reply
?? (Blunder)
? (Mistake)
?! (Dubious move)
!? (Interesting move)
! (Good move)
‼ (Brilliant move)
[+] [-] combatentropy|7 years ago|reply
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|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drewrv|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drfuchs|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kazinator|7 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=17504267
[+] [-] computator|7 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] hannasanarion|7 years ago|reply
Clearly you've never tried to learn a second language?
Word segmentation is a very difficult task for non-native speakers. Segmentation failure is a common error in children learning for the first time.
The word breaks are only obvious to you because you've had decades of daily practice parsing them. Look at a speech stream as a waveform or spectrogram, and they vanish: they are objectively not there.
[+] [-] falcor84|7 years ago|reply
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_langua...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_(linguistics)
[+] [-] davidgay|7 years ago|reply
Not in all languages. Lookup "liaison" in French, e.g. (and a not uncommon complaint of people learning French is that they can't separate the words in spoken speech).
[+] [-] pbhjpbhj|7 years ago|reply
Try saying "Hangdogears". Is it "hangdog ears" is it "hang dog ears" is it "hang dogears".
(hangdog = guilty visage; dogears = folded page corners)
Try it on someone else and see how they interpret it.
[+] [-] dmurray|7 years ago|reply
I suspect a major reason not listed is inertia: people were used to reading without spaces between words, and never considered the alternative. With some help from reason #2, the increased cost.
[+] [-] lokedhs|7 years ago|reply
But languages are never completely logical. There are planty of writing systems where there are no breaks between words. Some of the ones I can think of includes Thai, Korean and Chinese.
[+] [-] nkrisc|7 years ago|reply
Perhaps you only spend time around trained actors who enunciate their speech. Because let me tell to most people I know ramble their speech into one long string of sounds. Go listen to a recording of a language you know nothing about and tell me what the words are. Oh, and not a news cast, but everyday conversation between friends having a good time.
You speak English so you know it's "the dog jumped" and not "thud awgjumpt." But if you yell both of those quickly there's not any difference.
[+] [-] jgtrosh|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toxik|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] superflyguy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kazinator|7 years ago|reply
What a fail! Perfect opportunity missed to use the word "boustrophedon": and in the matching historic context, too.
[+] [-] thanatos_dem|7 years ago|reply
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|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] corobo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pwelch|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hurpaDurpa|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justinator|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snarfy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jarred|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] majos|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BjoernKW|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ggambetta|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GuiA|7 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuation#"Love_point"_and_s...
[+] [-] jobigoud|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Stratoscope|7 years ago|reply
https://flic.kr/p/LTD9Cs
http://lizcrainceramics.com/
[+] [-] gremlinsinc|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jobigoud|7 years ago|reply
(Ah, HN strips emoji away from comments).
https://emojipedia.org/face-with-one-eyebrow-raised/
[+] [-] garmaine|7 years ago|reply
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|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmmcd|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] golergka|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slurple|7 years ago|reply