The next new symbol did not arrive until 1962, when a Madison Avenue executive named Martin K Speckter wrote a magazine article in which he proposed combining the question and exclamation marks to create a new symbol – ‽ – that he called the ‘interrobang’. To introduce his new mark, Speckter explained that Christopher Columbus must have been both excited and doubtful when he first sighted the Americas. Did he shout “Land, ho!” or “Land, ho?” – or was it some combination of the two? The interrobang, Speckter wrote, was the perfect way to capture the ambiguity. The Wall Street Journal had a pithier example: “Who forgot to put gas in the car‽” Speckter explained that the symbol’s evocative name came from the Latin interrogatio, or ‘questioning’, and the word ‘bang’, a printers’ nickname for the exclamation mark.

As a canny advertising executive, Speckter was happy to give interviews about the interrobang on television and in print, and his creation soon took on a life of its own. In 1966, a type designer called Richard Isbell added an interrobang to a typeface called Americana; a year later, the typewriter company Remington Rand released a replacement key bearing an interrobang after one of its designers saw Isbell’s version of the mark in a brochure. Interrobangs appeared in book titles, magazine articles, and in ’zines too, where writers typed them by striking ‘?’, backspace, then ‘!’.

Out with a bang

And then, nothing. Within a decade of Speckter’s magazine article, the interrobang was almost nowhere to be seen. Books, magazines and newspapers in those days were typeset using mechanical devices that supported only a limited number of symbols, and the interrobang never quite managed to find a permanent place among more conventional commas, dashes, and full stops. Writers could type interrobangs but printers could not print them, and the interrobang’s days were numbered.