interrobang: punctuation mark that's a combination exclamation point and question mark

What do you get when you combine an eroteme and an ecphoneme?

Interrobang ("in-TEHR-oh-BANG")!

Quite possibly the most fun-to-say punctuation mark there is. I genuinely love this thing and wish it was more widely accepted and used in our books and texting and websites and such. What an ingenious little piece of grammar. And there actually is a way to insert one into anything you type.

If you're on a Windows system, hold down ALT and then type "+203D" and it will magically appear.

For Mac users, you'll need to search for interrobang in your emoji menu, aka the "character palette" menu. Some Macs come with a 🌐 key that brings up this menu with a tap; for everyone else, hold down control and command and press the space bar.

If you really want to integrate ‽ into your work, Mac and iOS users have an easy way to get it done: text replacement. In System Settings, go to "Keyboard" and look for "Input Sources." Click the "Text Replacement" button, and a menu will pop up. From here, you just click the + button and set it so that every time you type ? followed by !, or vice versa, it instantly replaces it with ‽. See, I just did it right there.

Did you know that there are all sorts of "proposed punctuation marks" that people have tried/are trying to get enough of the population to use that they become part of our lives? They include:

• multiple types of Irony or Sarcasm Marks

• Acclamation Mark (think next-level exclamation point)

• Conviction Mark

• Authority Mark

• Doubt Mark

• Appreciation Mark

• Exclamation Colon

and many more. I think the majority of them are intended to help convey tone of voice or emotional intent, which can be vague when reading plain text. But it's hard to imagine a world with all of these extra punctuation marks conveying so many deeper meanings.

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