Punctuation for the Awe-Struck Spaniard

Few pet interests could out-geek typography fandom. I mean, you’re talking about enthusiasm for an element of life that the vast majority of people see constantly but which they could not care less about. However, I maintain that punctuation marks are interesting, and the following post will either prove or disprove that assertion.

By now, many literary people know of the interrobang, a sort of punctuational hermaphrodite that mashed the exclamation point and the question mark into a multipronged twofer. Perhaps you read about it on this blog back in 2005, when I learned of it and I exploded with interrobang-worthy levels of surprise and amazement. Or perhaps you’re just, like, super smart. In case this word interrobang is new to you, here’s the gist: Instead of lining the end marks back-to-back in the manner of “It’s full of snakes?!” you can instead conserve space by simply punctuating it “It’s full of snakes‽” (I’m unsure what’s a more shocking thing to be snake-full. Your Prius? A pinata? A womb?) The interrobang is handy enough, I say, though I’d imagine less astute readers would wonder what the hell is wrong with that capital “P.” Invented by ad man Martin K. Specktor in 1962, the interrobang actually found a certain level of mainstream acceptance, even getting a spot on certain typewriter models in 1968. Of course, it never made it to the big leagues, but I say it still has a chance. I mean, look how ubiquitous the at sign and the hash mark are today compared to how rarely we used them twenty years ago.

A funny footnote to the story of the interrobang — a story that, were it published in book form, should be titled Huh‽ Wha‽ Really‽ — is that its creation necessitated a second mark for those writing in Spanish. In this language, writers have the odd habit of giving the reader a heads up with a question or exclamation is coming. I’ve always wondered why, exactly, and why the inverted question mark or exclamation point at the beginning of a sentence stuck with Spanish and no other major language. But this is what Spanish does. Thus, if an interrobang were to be used at the end of a sentence — “Esta llena de serpientes,” for example — you’d need an upside-down one at the beginning.

And the name of this mark, by the way, is my word of the week. (Took me long enough, I know.)

gnaborretni (nab-or-RET-nee) — noun: The symbol ⸘ (an inverted superimposed exclamation point and question mark), used in place of ¡¿ in Spanish, Galician, and Leonese.

The etymology? It’s simply interrobang backwards, which seems especially clever until you realize that the gnaborretni isn’t actually a backwards interrobang so much as an upside-down one. But, you know, whatever.

May all your Spanish interrogative exclamations be stylishly punctuated.

You may be wondering why I have included a picture of an orange wearing a crown. You see, the thing is, my intended word of the week was going to be realgar, the name of a pigment once considered to be the only source of pure orange but which fell out of use because it’s horrendously poisonous. In fact, it’s also one of the main sources or arsenic. This story these once-prevalent colors that we no longer use, in combination with orange’s status as the least-beloved color in the spectrum or even colors that aren’t actually colors, like pink or magenta, seemed promising a few days ago but ended up being pretty sucky when expressed by me. But I’d already Photoshopped the orange. Thus, this: King Orange.

Apparently I think punctuation is more interesting than deadly poison.

Previous words of the week after the jump.

• acné excoriée des jeunes filles, adulterine, ageusia, ambeer, anosmia
• barrack, beeturia, bissextile, bloofer, breastsummer
• catholicon, cecaelia, cephalophore, cherpumple, chilver, cockernonnie, collywobbles, coprolalia, couvade, cranberry morpheme, crwth, culaccino, cummingtonite
• deasil, decussate, deuteragonist, dingbat, dingle
• eidolon, epeolatry, epopt, espalier, etui, exoterica
• fabiform, Feghoot, fissilingual, Föhnkrankheit, folderol, froward
• gallinipper, grandgore, grue, guilloche, gyaru
• hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia, hobson-jobson, hogo, honorificabilitudinitatibus
• ignivomous, iracund, isabelline, itaiitai
• jabroni, jamais vu, jehu, jumentous
• kaffir, kakopygian, kayfabe, knipperdollin
• lagniappe, leman, lemniscate, limnovore, linsey-woolsey, longicorn
• malacia, malison, maroon, milt, mongo, mooncalf, morepork, muzjiks
• narrenfreiheit, nef, nihilartikel, nobiliary particle, nosism
• ochanee, ogonek, ombré, ooglification, orchidectomy, ordured, orf
• pace, padiddle, pareidolia, pavonated, perendiate, perigee, petrichor, pettifogger, pettitoes, phlegmagogue, pismire, pogonip, pong, pruniferous, puggle, pulveratricious, purse
• quacksalver, quagga, qualtagh, quidnunc, quiff
• ronion, roynish, rubirosa, rumpsprung, runcible
• salmagundi, scrutator, seneschal, sharrow, shebang, sinople, slampadato, slubberdegullion, stan, stevedore, suovetaurilia
• tappen, teratogenesis, tergiversate, tetromino, thagomizer, thon, tiffin, tittery-whoppet, tmesis, toby, tutoyer, tyro
• ucalegon, ultramontane, umiaq, umquhile
• veneficial, verdigris, vespertilionine, vinegeroon
• weeaboo, widdiful, williwaw, witzelsucht, wooper looper
• xenodocheionology, xyster
• yazoo, ypsiliform, yoink
• zanjero, zenzizenzizenzic, zinnober, zugzwang

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The Rooster Stampede of 1978

Courtesy of Dina, two things:

The below image, in which the cut-out design in a rail along a sidewalk in some unfortunate town cast a shadow that looks like so many penises.

courtesy eyje.com

And the ensuing discussion on Reddit, which, as Dina pointed out, discusses the value — or lack thereof — in the interrobang, only a day after I recalled my original post about this elusive and so-very-special punctuation mark.

The Punctuation Round-Up

I hate History 4A. I hate studying. I hate finals.

As a result of these three hatreds converging on one night — my last before I'm done with this shitbag quarter — I have spent the last hour procrastinating. Instead of the boring stuff I hate, I read all about boring stuff I like. For your edification, I've collected this knowledge here. Now learn something.

[ Ye Olde Missing Letter ]

Among many other things, a subject that came up during a talk I had with New Megan was the letter Thorn. The way Megan told it, Thorn is the name of a symbol for the th sound — either way you can pronounce it, whether voiced like in "the" or voiceless like in "thick." Though we still use the sounds — lispers more than others — we don't have the symbol, which in its day looks kind of like this: Þ

It's a vertical line with a loop coming out of the right side, just lower than it would on a P. Neat, huh? The interesting part about all this is that a certain influential printer named William Caxton decided to substitute Y for Þ, for reasons I will surely never understand. Because of that, it was standard practice to use Y to make the th noises for a while. This has all but disappeared except on quaint, folky-like store signs, like "Ye Olde Whorehouse" and stuff like that. People mistakenly pronounce "Ye" like yee when it's actually just a fucked-up way to spell "the."

Neat, huh?

[ And, Per Se ]

As near as anyone can tell, the ampersand was born around 63 B.C. when a scribe named Marcus Tullius Tiro created the first system shorthand we can find record of. As a speaker of Latin, Marcus' word for "and" was "et." Whether he joined the two letters together or whether that was already standard practice among writers at the time, we're not sure, but the oldest form of the ampersand is a fancy way of writing "et."

If you look in this picture below, you can easily make out the individual E and T in the classical ampersand on the right. The more modern, more familiar one on the left, however, has changed quite a bit.

The name of the letter comes from a recitation of the phrase "et, per se and," a mishmash of Latin and English that basically translates to "et, which by itself means and." For a while, the ampersand was treated like a quasi-letter and stuck onto the end of alphabets. People slurred "et, per se and" into "ampersand." (And there's a phony etymology for the name of the symbol which traces it back to the phrase "emperor's hand," but don't believe it. Believe me instead.)

And I know inventing shorthand is technically a big accomplishment, but I'm way more impressed that Marcus Tullius Tiro has gone down in history as the inventor of the ampersand.

[ The Tragically Short Life of the Interrobang ]

Apparently having decided that English punctuation didn't pack enough punch, New York ad exec Martin Specktor introduced a new end punctuation — the interrobang — to the printed word in 1962.

This mark, which looks like a malformed P with a dot under it, is actually an exclamation point and question mark combined — hence the name. "Interrobang," by the way beat out other suggestions for the name like "rhet," "exclarotive," and my favorite, "exclamoquest."

Specktor even concocted a name for the upside-down interrobang that would rightly precede a Spanish sentence expressing both surprise and interrogation: the gnaborretni, which is "interrobang" backwards.

The interrobang fared better than you might think. Supposedly, it showed up in some magazine articles and print advertisements. Remington brand typewriters even included an interrobang key for a few years. As you probably could guess, however, the mark ultimately faded into obscurity. Today, the standard practice for punctuated a surprised question is to use ?! or !?. There's no rule saying which order you have to use, but it's generally not considered a trait of formal writing.

And I'm totally not shitting you. This has to be the only instance of fad punctuation I've ever heard of.

I just like that the first sentence I can think of that would actually make good use of the the interrobang is "What the fuck?!" And that is exactly what people should have said when someone tried to explain the interrobang.