growler_south

"The English language is constantly evolving. During the twentieth century alone we observed this evolution in many ways: spelling changes, new words, technology terms, scientific terms, and colloquialisms. Punctuation is also evolving. In 1962, the interrobang was introduced by the New York publishing establishment as 'a twentieth century punctuation mark'. The interrobang combined the functions of a question mark and an exclamation point. It received some attention at first, but never caught on, although for a brief period during the 1960s it was added to some typewriter keyboards."

Thanks

bikerbearmark

Ah yes, the great period crisis of the sixties. In 1963 an uncommonly cold winter all but wiped out the vast period plantations of central Venezuela. The Colombian boutique period growers, suddenly finding themselves without competition, immediately took advantage of their near-monopoly, inflating prices and triggering a panic in the publishing industry.
Beat poets, faced with the escalating price of periods, had no choice but to

begin
experimenting with bizarre
and
unreadable
layouts to
create rythm and
flow

The mainstream publishing industry, meanwhile, struggled to economise. Sentence length and complexity increased dramatically as writers were constrained by tighter budgets. But nowhere was the pinch felt more than in the burgeoning soap opera industry, where every second sentence in a manuscript was expected to end with an exclamation point or a question mark or, preferably, both. Early attempts to simply render exclamation points without the period resulted in utter confusion, as the dim-witted actors mistook the period-less punctuation for the letter 'L'.
"But honeyl", she cried, "He's deadl"
The Interrobang was the saviour of the Soap writing industry. Combining the question mark and exclamation point into one unmistakable piece of punctuation, the interrobang not only reduced the number of periods needed to finish a sentence, it also meant EVERY sentence could now be closed with both a question mark and an exlamation point, resulting in twice as much acting for the dollar.

Alas the interrobang came too late. By the time soap actors had been trained to recognise the Interrobang, the Indian period factories were in full swing, cheaply producing the artificial periods that are now ubiquitous in all but the most expensive literature.

So the interrobang was largely forgotten as the publishing industry went back to its old ways, ending dramatic sentences in a hedonistic display of punctuation. Perhaps its time for an interrobang renaissance?