Bulletin Board, excerpt

THIS 'N' THAT 'N' THE OTHER (RESPONSORIAL)

Posted to (St. Paul Pioneer Press) Bulletin Board, February 28, 2004

THIS 'N' THAT 'N' THE OTHER (RESPONSORIAL)




Here's The Retired Printer of West St. Paul: "Red Cedar Recluse wondered why there wasn't a punctuation mark to denote sarcasm. "About 20 years ago, some language pundits attempted to introduce a new mark called an interrobang to cover such situations. "How did they come up with the name 'interrobang'? For this, we must turn to proofreaders and copyholders, who have a language all their own. These two take turns, one reading out loud while the other follows the copy or the galley proof. They have to read fast, so to save time they often shorten some terms to single syllables. For instance: 'interro' for question mark, 'point' for period, and 'com' for comma. For the lengthy 'exclamation mark,' the very descriptive BANG tells it all, as in 'Slam!' The pundits combined the interrogation mark with the proofreader's exclamation mark and came up with 'interrobang.' "The interrobang would have resembled a dollar sign, with an exclamation point drawn through a question mark. It would have been used in phrases such as: 'You did what!?' It never caught on, and writers are still left to their own devices to convey how they want the reader to grasp what they are trying to say."