Listen Up‼ Posted Sun, 26 Dec 2004

I've heard folks on mailing lists argue (only partially in jest) that multiple punctuation points, and in particular multiple exclamation points, are a sure sign of a brain damage.

Recently I've been wondering what to make of folks who use the interrobang (‽) and other Unicode characters that combine multiple pieces of punctuation into a single glyph (like ⁉, ⁈, and of course ‼). Do these count as one punctuation point or a single new hybrid mark? What does using ending a sentence with such a mark say about the author⁇

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Responses to This Post

I just checked my sources and now i can assure you that i am not caused by blogging of this kind.
Nevermind.
Keep it up!!!
Posted by Brain Damage at Sun Dec 26 17:16:57 2004
Punctuation marks are great‼
Posted by Carlos Laviola at Sun Dec 26 23:51:36 2004
How the fuck did you do ‽ I've never seen ‽ before‽ I copied and pasted your original ‽ but I have no idea how I would create my very own ‽ I really like ‽ I think it's really fucking expressive and I'd like to type in my own ‽ without having to resort to your blog to copy your ‽ and then paste it‽
Posted by louai at Mon Dec 27 00:31:22 2004
Maybe you can try typing in Japanese; there is a pretty good chance for the characters to show up as boxes or mutated alphabets even when you don't want them to.
Posted by mika at Mon Dec 27 10:02:46 2004
There's another thing. Putting whitespace before punctation. That drives me crazy. ;-D
Posted by opi at Mon Dec 27 16:39:02 2004
Louai: Chances are, there is not a built-in compose key for the interrobang. You can check out this wikipedia article on the markt though: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interrobang

I suspect that if your OS/GUI supports composing Unicode character by pressing some magic key follows by the Unicode decimal codepoint (listed on the wikipedia page), you can compose it. It's then only a matter of memorizing a 4 diget number.

You should be careful because not everyone will have a Unicode font installed that includes the interrobang. It is, sadly, not a standard punctuation mark.
Posted by mako at Mon Dec 27 21:42:20 2004
Chess players have used !!, !?, ?!, ?? in annotations for years, for excellent, interesting, dubious, and blunder respectively.

Of course this maybe considered (final and convincing?!) proof that only the mentally afflicted use such punctuation marks!?

I shall reserve interrobang for my more interesting blunders!!
Posted by Simon at Tue Dec 28 06:43:21 2004

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