Fun With Punctuation

Anyone who reads The Oatmeal (if you don't, you should) may have learned the other day about the interrobang. What, you might be asking yourself, exactly is an interrobang? Despite it's devious name, it's not an unorthodox method of questioning the police only use when the cameras just so happen to disconnect themselves. Rather, it's a punctuation mark. This is an interrobang.

‽

It's a combination of a question mark and an exclamation point, and is sometimes called a quesclamation mark. It is used to indicate exactly what a question mark and an exclamation point are used to indicate surprise and alarm. So instead of saying "WHAT THE HELL?!" you could say "WHAT THE HELL‽"

After I learned about the wonderful interrobang, I thought it'd be fun to enlighten the five or six people who read this blog on some wonderfully under-used punctuation marks that I found on Wikipedia.

A close cousin to the interrobang, though with a much less interesting name, the irony/sarcasm punctuation mark, which is a backward question mark.

؟

Next, one that I think most people will be familiar with, that paragraph sign. I bring this one to you not because I don't think you know it, but because I don't think you know it's actual name - the pilcrow. I like it.

 ¶

You're probably also familiar with the percent sign, %. But have you ever seen a permille, which indicates parts per thousand, as a opposed to parts per hundred?

‰

Or how about a permyriad, which indicates parts per ten thousand?

‱

Another one that I liked is the interpunct. You've probably seen it in a dictionary to indicate syllibifcation, but but the ancient Greeks used it first as a way to separate words. Using a space to separate them didn't evolve until much later.

Lorem·ipsum

Finally, I bring to you a generic symbol for currency. I saw this once in an economics paper, where the currency being exchanged was "Utils," an arbitrary unit of measure for "utility," or happiness. Because no symbol exists for using utility as a currency, the author used (what I now recognize to be) the symbol for general currency.

¤

So that was my morning, hopefully your computer can actually read all those symbols because this is definitely something worth whipping out at a party.