Wednesday, December 12, 2001
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Wednesday, December 12, 2001 |
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It's a bird? It's a plane?? It's interrobang??? By
SALLIE SATTERTHWAITE When we were kids, my brother and I used to read comic books to each other to make fun of the devices used to express excitement, like Superman fighting off the bad guys. Every other cartoon frame was filled with words like POW!! BANG!! KER-BOOM!! CRASH!! in gigantic jagged letters, with lightning flashes for emphasis. We were big into drollery and thought it was hilarious to read in dull, flat voices, utterly devoid of emotion: "oh. oh. look. it's a bird. it's a plane. it's su-per-man. he's going to throw that lo-co-mo-tive at us. bang. pow. crash." And then we'd just roll on the floor laughing at ourselves. All right, so we led dull lives in those pre-television days. Or maybe we were intuiting
what more experienced lexiphiles already knew, that exclamation marks
have an honored place in comic books, but virtually nowhere else. As one
critic pointed out, "Reading the adventures of superheroes just wouldn't
be the same without huge sound effects spilling off the page, pummeling
our senses in bright colors, many topped off with enormous exclamation
points." At first I thought editors were just stodgy old fogies, but the more I read and learned to critique, I came to agree that copy loaded with !!! looks pretty amateurish. In fact, in Richard Dowis and Richard Lederer's little guidebook on writing, "The Write Way," they say exactly that: "This mark is much beloved of high school sophomores." A newspaper man still squirms when he remembers a journalism professor reading over his shoulder. "You used an exclamation point in this story," said the prof, pointing to the offensive punctuation and glaring over the top of his spectacles. "People who get paid to write do not use exclamation points." Punctuation itself reaches back to 200 B.C. and forward to our times, and evolves slowly. The exclamation point, for example, dates from about Columbus' era, but did not enter common usage until about 400 years ago. Believe it or not, some printers used a question mark for an exclamation point as recently as 1697. The last major effort to add a symbol to the language was in 1962, when Martin Speckter, in an article for TYPEtalks magazine, proposed a new punctuation mark to denote a question and exclamation at the same time. He called it the "interrobang." You can see how it was derived, the merging of the interrogative and the word "bang." The term "bang," for exclamation point, comes from early printers' and proofreaders' slang, but has also spilled over into computer language. Before autorouters were prevalent on the Internet, a device for routing messages was called a "bang path" because exclamation points bangs are inserted to indicate new material. While the exclamation point can single-handedly startle a reader, the interrobang can convey an attitude on the page, Speckter averred. Here are a few sentences that could make use of the Interrobang: "How about that?!" "You left the car out of gas?!" "You're going out in public dressed like that?!" My personal favorite falls from Dave's lips when I've had a mishap like double-salting the soup or breaking a flower pot: "Why did you do that?!" It's not a question, but the words force us to use a question mark while the attitude requires an exclamation mark. Well, Speckter did enjoy limited success with his new punctuation mark. The printing industry added a type face that included the interrobang in 1966, and Remington Rand included it as an option on its 1968 typewriters. They said the new punctuation mark "expresses modern life's incredibility." I'll bet they meant incredulity. Modern life may have become jaded by its own incredulity, however, and the interrobang fell out of common use. But the mark is not extinct in the computer age. It is alive, if obscure, and may be found in Microsoft Word. Go to Format, choose Fonts, then Wingdings 2. There are supposed to be four different versions, but I could get only two to work in Word 2000. In Wingdings 2, try the '~ key, the ]} key, 6^ key, or the -_ key. Now you too can say, incredulously, "You call that a hat " and "What did you do to your hair " Wow
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