Wednesday, 2 October 2024

What The Hell‽

Human history has been all about figuring out how to make things easier so washing machines replaced finding a river and hitting clothes with stones and the internet so men didn't have the embarassment of paying for a magazine from the top shelf at the counter but sometimes we go the opposite way and makes things more burdensome than they used to be.
How many times have you written a sentence asking a question in an excited manner or expressing excitement, disbelief or confusion and then gone back over your secondary school English lessons to work out if it should be a ! or an ? at the end?
Not anymore, or rather not since the 1960's when some clever fellow came up with a way of expressing confusion and excitement in a single punctuation mark of a question mark with an exclamation point inside it and everyone said 'What the Hell Is That!?' and he replied, actually it's 'What The Hell Is That‽' and he gave it the awful name The Interrobang from 'interro' from the Latin for cross-examination and bang which is printers’ slang for an exclamation mark.
It was a short lived thing back in the 16th Century when a reversed question mark was used for a rhetorical question which didn't need an answer but after it was revicved in 1962, it appeared on some typewriters in America throughout the 1960's and was used in magazine and newspaper articles before falling out of favour again and though it’s not used often now, you could type out both, but where’s the fun in that‽

3 comments:

Not really a blog said...

you think that is what human history is all about? did you actually study any history? i mean, we know you didn't study economic history, war history, middle east history, innovation history, and you seemingly know nothing about the history of communism and socialism... where did you learn that human history is all about making things easier?

Falling on a bruise said...

Blimey, ease up on that strong coffee for a while. You are getting stranger and stranger.

Not really a blog said...

ahhh, another attempt to divert. did you ever study history?