Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Interrobangs

Episode Date: December 8, 2025

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why interrobangs are secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5Visit http://sifpod.store/ to get shirts and posters celebrating the show.

Interabangs, known for being a question mark, famous for an exclamation point along with a question mark, maybe on top of it. Nobody thinks much about them, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why interabangs are secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there folks, hey there, Ciphalopods. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name's Alex Schmidt and I'm not alone because I'm joined by my co-host, Katie Golden, Katie. Yes. What's your relationship to or opinion of?

Interabangs? What? Yeah. Thank you for clock. I tried to put one on the edge. I'm familiar with them I think it's fun I like it when grammar is fun

I like it when you just mush stuff together and you're like yeah that makes sense we'll just smash these together and it means that both of them together it makes sense I think I learned about it like when I was a kid and I was just so pumped that grabber could be silly

it feels creative it feels exciting if folks super don't know at Ontario Bank is a combination of a question mark and an exclamation point. Right. And this episode will end up talking often about the multi-character version where people just type those back to back instead of it being one merged symbol. But the primary first thing we'll talk about is the merged symbol. It's kind of neat because like an exclamation point and a question mark

kind of feel like they're the same thing. You just bent the exclamation point a little bit. Yeah. Yeah, they do feel like they are cousins or something or the same blacksmith made them. Sure. I know it's typographers and stuff, but I'm imagining a medieval forge. Yeah, either bent one to make the other or unbent one. We don't know.

I don't remember when I learned that the symbol was an option or a thing. I don't think I've thought about the symbol a lot, but I have seen and liked the multi-character version a whole lot. And you can just keep going to, like you can put a bunch of them in a row. It's great. Like, is there a limit to how many question marks and or exclamation points you're allowed to put together? No, it doesn't seem like it. Oh, sweet. This is the grammatical symbol of the people.

A little bit, yeah, yeah. It's sort of a party crusher. It just sort of showed up using existing marks, and people said, I guess people are doing this. Sweet. A little bit of our Rodney Dangerfield walks in and music starts playing, and then the party. better. Yeah, no, I mean, it's got that vibes. It's got the bad boy vibes of like Owen Wilson in the wedding crashers.

I mean, if you look at an entero bang, it does look a little bit like Owen Wilson. Oh. The response I should have said is, wow. Oh, wow. And like, if he goes, wow, then he's using the interrobang. Yeah, there we go. And thank you to folks for suggesting this. It came from Fated Sticker on the Discord, J.C.R. Dude on the Discord, and other folks, too.

And we got a really fun episode out of it to get into. On every episode, we lead with a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. This week, that's in a segment called, Grandma got run over by a number. Walking home from our stats Christmas Eve. You might say there's no such stats as numbers. But as for me, an algorithm and pawy binomial. Yay.

I don't know if I did that right. That name was submitted by Andy W. Thank you, Andy W. We have a new name for this segment every week. Please make them as silly and wacky and bad as possible. Submit through Discord or to siftpot at gmail.com. The simple first number is two, because an interrobang is a ligature of two common punctuation marks. It's a ligature, eh?

It's a ligature. getting fancy with these with these grammars ligature yeah it's it's as if a distinguished Taylor walked in to describe Owen Wilson's outfit right and then Owen says wow and then you know I'm turning into a cat huh anyway meow meow meow and Wilson there we go yeah yeah and Wilson there we go we did it and if folks have heard past SIF episodes about stuff like the ampersand. They've heard the term ligature. In music, it's a slur or a slide or something, but in writing and typography, a ligature is a line that creates a continuous connection between characters. Okay. And that can just be a style thing, like some fonts having the seriffs just

do a thing or all cursive writing. There's ligatures between everything. Right. And it can also generate new characters. The ampersand is a ligature of the letter E and the letter T. because the word at means and in Latin. And so it generated into an and where it's E.T. And yeah, and the interrobang is a lot like that amp or sand at. It's a ligature of both a question mark and an exclamation point. In most fonts, they just have the stems of the two merge at their lowest point. And then they both have a dot on the bottom.

So there's just one dot. Right. It just kind of looks like you crossed out a question mark. Like, oh, no, never mind. I'm no longer confused. Yeah. And also, there's a few key sources this week. One of them is just my type, a book about fonts by award-winning nonfiction writer Simon Garfield.

He describes an idea where the ligature of an entera bang has actually made it less popular over time. Because the lines are so close together, it does look like some kind of crossout or muddle in anything but a really big font. I would say it's not like a really elegant-looking symbol. It just kind of looks like you may have screwed up a question mark sometimes. I agree, yeah. I think that's part of why I don't really think about and especially don't type the actual merged in Terabang that much because we're so familiar with both these punctuation marks it's made of, it looks like a mess up or a mistake or a model.

So it's oddly, at least according to people's general practice with it, kind of impractical. We don't use it a lot. It just doesn't seem like it's solving a problem unless you're really limited on page space. Yeah, exactly. The practical case for it is almost nothing. And also it exists. And almost everyone either knows what it is or understands it. It's weird where it both looks like a muddle and is pretty easy to decode and figure out.

Right. And even the jolt you get when you see it kind of feels like the meaning of it. Like, huh? Inquisitive and emphatic. Hmm. It's a really amazing character if you just sit with it for a long time. Like the Tim Allen grunt is kind of what we're like, uh-huh. Yeah, truly. I feel like we're really building a Intera Bang, the movie.

Owen Wilson stars Tim Allen as his friend. You know, it's coming together. Yeah. No, we're getting there. The Intera Bang, as we said, just means exactly what. what these two marks mean put together. One comparable ligature-based character in writing is a character called Ash or Aish.

Folks have probably seen it. It's when there's a letter A followed by the letter E, and they're connected instead of being separate. It was common in Old English. People started dropping it out of English almost 1,000 years ago. It's common today in a few Scandinavian languages. Much like in Terabang, you can just type an A followed by an E, instead of making sure to have them ligature connected.

Yeah. It seems like there's not, there has to be a pretty good reason to smush stuff together in the language because otherwise I think it can just be a little confusing. That's what people seem to think, yeah. And so the Intera Bang is rare. And the next number about it is nine. Because in researching this,

I found at least nine proposed alternative names for the Intera Bang. There's so many kept popping up I started indexing them for this Right Because interrobang is not so obvious Of the name for it It turns out I did not at all know Why half the name is like that

I correctly guessed that Intero the first half Is related to the question mark Right like interrogative or something Yeah exactly And it turns out that's all Latin roots Like interagadio and stuff It's all just interrogation question words.

Right. I had no idea that interrobang is a portmanteau of all these Latin words for a question and the English writing slang word of bang. Hmm. The word bang is slang for an exclamation point. Yeah, I didn't know that. I mean, it makes sense. And I thought they were just like having fun with the name.

Like bang, you know, but no, it's something that people in the mid-1900s, United States, States understood. Like an explosive sound? I found a few conflicting stories about the origin. It might be kind of a combo. All that's clear is people definitely knew this nickname. Right. One possible origin is comic book,

Anamotapia splash words for sounds. Really? Like when they write in, pow, and zip and bang in a comic book. That's funny. It's a possible origin of the nickname where people just started calling exclamation points bangs. Because that's how comics used them, you know, starting in the early 1900s in the U.S.

I'm very familiar with the pow, bang, smack. But I always thought it was supposed to be the automontopia for Batman punching the Joker repeatedly in the groin. So like, so how did that become, did like the comic book sort of bang like become, I guess like a synecichy or like associated with the exclamation point? Is that the idea? Yeah, that's right. Yeah, we'd had exclamation points for a long time, and then that's the theory. And again, this could be not where the nickname comes from, but it's one possibility.

Okay, so we're not exactly sure, but that seemed like. Yeah. Bang was already in the public consciousness as like the sound of Batman, uh, hitting the Joker and the Nads. Right. In many ways, we have to hand it to the Joker. And then I look up what the Joker's up to him like, In hindsight, you do not have to hand it to the Joker.

You absolutely do not got to hand it to the Joker. And then another interesting claim is that bang might have been the way that businessmen dictated exclamation points to secretaries. Hmm. Like when they're just say, take a memo and then they just verbally say what they want written. Bang! Those four secretaries are just always getting like jump scared by like, like, like, and I send my best. Bang! Did you review these documents? Bang!

Another secretary drops all the ice they were bringing for the man's liquor in the middle of the day. Again. Okay. Let me just keep writing this, uh, this note. Oh, God. Okay. Yeah. Poor secretaries. They had to put up with so much. Yeah, like the claim here is that stuff like periods and question marks were obvious just from context of how the businessman was saying it. But it wasn't clear if Like, maybe they're speaking softly, but they want the writing to have an exclamation point. Or maybe they're speaking loudly, but they don't want it to be all exclamation points in the memo. So they started saying bang to indicate exclamation points in dictated writing. Right.

And also exclamation point is how many syllables is that exclamation point? That's five syllables. Another number. Yeah, yeah. Time is money, Alex. And who's got time for five syllables? Yeah, time is money, bang. Who's got time for five syllables in Tarabang?

Yeah. No, I mean, you know, I think that makes sense. It's a nicer name than exclamation point. Yeah, it's fun. And then there's other theories about the exclamation point block in typesetting and block printing being loud when it went through the machine. Like there's a lot of loose theories. I don't know if any of them are accurate, but we do know that bang was. was the nickname in the mid-1900s.

That one sounds truthy in the sense that I don't believe it, because I feel like it's, then why wouldn't a question mark be loud when it's, you know what I mean? Or a period. Like, there's nothing special about an exclamation point that should make it louder when you're doing press printing. Same here. I was discounting it when I read it. I was like, okay, champ.

No, big doubt. Big doubt. No cap as, wait, wait, no, cap, right? Cap is when, yeah, cap, cap, cap. Cap bang. Cap bang, yeah. And so, yeah, people in the mid-1900s understood in Tara Bang. They knew it's a question plus an exclamation from the name.

Right. Beyond the name in Tara Bang, people suggested at least nine other names for this combo character. And I'm going to list them out. And you can just enjoy them. Okay, I'm ready. I'm ready to hear them. The first idea is the exclamma quest. Yes, love it.

Next is Empha quest. I love it a little less, but it's still good. I like exclamma quest more, yeah. Third one is intera point. It's all right. Yeah, it's okay. Next one is exclarogative. That one sounds like a sort of disease that affects your bronchial

tubes. Yeah, another one here is exclarative. Exclarative? And yeah, both of them sound like you're digging something out of tissue, yeah. Yeah, or like exclarative sounds a little bit like a medicine for allergies. Like, can you not play with your kids in a field of dandelions? Well, take exclarative. Yeah, it's like extra strength clarid in, yeah.

Right, and it depicts a tastefully dressed grandmother playing with child. in a field of dandelions. Finally, I'm not alone. Right. Which is the message of every medicine commercial. Do you want your grandchildren to visit you more? Exclarative. Okay, so that's five of them.

The sixth one here is quesclamation mark. Yeah, that's a bad one, but I do like it. Quesclamation mark. It's terrible. That just sounds like something I say when I'm really tired. Yeah, yeah. Because I do tend to like smush sometimes when I'm tired, I smooch words together and I say I'm bad. So that's what that sounds like.

Man, yeah, same. Anytime I'm trying to figure out stuff for life after like 11 p.m. The words don't. Yeah, yeah, I'm done. They're not there. I'll be like, past our schmed time. We got to frondel off to schmed. Yes.

I'm going to start calling it the frondal hour. I'm in the frondal hour. I can't. I'm in the frontal hour. I got, you got my pylons. I got a pylons. My jambos. Brunch.

I got a brunge mative. Questclamation. Yes. Quesclamation, Mark. The logic is there. It's just so wonky. Yeah. Yeah.

Compared to Intara Bank. Yikes. Yeah. Seventh idea here. This is not any portmanteaus of anything, so I respect that. They wanted to call it a consternation mark. You know, the real word consternation. Well, yeah, but actually no, because it doesn't always mean consternation.

That's the problem with that. It could mean consternation. I agree. My understanding of consternation is it could be a quiet thing. Like, I could express consternation quietly sometimes, and I could express a Tim Allen when I'm not consternated, but rather aghast. Exactly. And that's also a problem with the next idea here, which is rat, R-H-E-T.

They wanted to call it a rat because the Intera Bank can be used to do rhetorical questions. So Red is short for rhetorical, and it's a rat mark, I guess. But also, it's not only for rhetorical questions. So I don't like that. Right. Yeah, exactly. There's also people named Rhett, I think. It's just one T instead of two.

People with the name like Ret Butler and Gone with the Wind and Red and Link on YouTube, you know, it's, yeah, with two T's. So that's confusing. Right. Yeah. Right. And Redemption. Oh, yeah. The horse test.

Yeah, sure. Yeah. It's about a guy named Rhett and his debt and how he gets redeemed. This is now a gaming podcast. Yeah, and so the rhetorical element, it has been part of the origin of this. Like, people suggest that the Intera Bang is best for statements like, who forgot to put gas in the car? Because it's really more of a rhetorical question. You're probably kind of accusing someone, you know? Right. So that was one name idea was just call it the rhetorical mark. But that didn't take off for all the reasons. Yeah.

If I could name it, I would name it the B-W-A. That's kind of better, yeah. Right? I like it. It really captures it. It's a bit Hank Hill, too. Like when he goes, Bo-W-H-H-H-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-And then it has one of those on the end. Yeah.

Yeah. Bo-H? And there's one more nickname here. they tried to call it the quiz ding. Okay, I love that one actually, though. It's kind of great. I like it a lot, quizzing. Come on.

That's just, that's, what a little scamp, that little quiz ding. He's always coming in going riddle me this. I really, I feel like it's all the strengths of Interra Bang, but a little more fun. It's impish. A lot of people don't know bang is an exclamation point, but also the ding part is short for a dingbat. dingbat is a real typography term for odd eccentric extra punctuation. So it's a quiz ding. It's great.

Yeah. I remember wing dings and dingbats. Yeah. Like people use that word already. So using it for the name of this is good. So quiz ding. Most place I saw it written, there's no space between the two halves of the word, but also they capitalize both parts.

So it's capital Q and a capital D. Oh, that, I don't know. I don't know about that. Now I'm less sold. We are so aligned. Yeah, I want it to be all lowercase, like in Terribank's name. I have strong opinions about these naming conventions. I hope you and me and the syphalopods are all just nodding throughout this episode. Right, we're all exactly.

You got to, it's got to be one word. It's got to be quizzing, one word. One word all lowercase, yeah, of course. And the mascot is a little bit like the great gazoo from the Flintstones. Absolutely. Oh, and then the things off of his helmet or the shape. They're in terror banks. Yeah.

Yeah. No, we're, we got it. Everyone was thinking it simultaneously. You, via the Ziphalopods, we had, we're in like the triple vat of the, the precogs and minority report. Just all having the same ideas, though. There's no minority report. We're just inventing typography. Yeah.

It's like pre-crime. God, no, that would be an abuse of civil rights. We're just coming up with better typing conventions. Yeah, just the screen of the police station says, quizzing, blah, and they're like, these are great ideas, eh? Defund the police fund this, you know? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. You can't spell interrogation without intero.

Oh, wow. We have one last number that gets us into the creation of this. The last number is March of 1962. 1962 is when the Intera Bang was invented. Makes sense to me. The 60s were a wild time full of hippies and contemporary art. Yeah. And just trying to do stuff.

That was legitimately part of the pitch for it, was that America in the 60s is breaking new ground in all sorts of ways. And this is a way we can do it. Yeah. Defying conventions. and doing it one little rascally in tarot bang at a time. Yeah, and we can fully explore its creation. And takeaway number one.

Interrobangs were created by a specific guy on a specific date who pitched it as the perfect punctuation for Christopher Columbus discovering America. Okay. Well, that's incredibly specific. Yeah, so much of writing in alphabets and characters and punctuation, it's just kind of around and there's not a origin date. This was extremely specifically proposed in an issue of a magazine written and edited by a guy named Martin K. Spector in March 1962. There's an inventor, a birth date, a location, everything. Right.

He created the Intera Bang. that's surprising to me he doesn't sound Italian and the only like Americans I could think of who were so devoted to Columbus that they would want to invent a whole new punctuation mark for him would be an Italian American yeah yeah this guy I'm a little over emphasizing Columbus but basically he spent a lot of his essay where he pitched the entire intarabang idea describing how when Columbus had the remarkable feeling of seeing land in the Caribbean and discovering the Americas, we should have this kind of character to write what he said in that moment. Right.

I mean, okay. Yeah, I mean. And it also speaks to... It really aptly describes a guy seeing some land and being confused by the fact that there's land, but excited by all the crimes he gets to do. And it also speaks to how, like, shockingly recently people started criticizing Christopher Columbus. Sure, yeah. The genocidal monster.

Yeah. In the United States, he was kind of our leading historical figure until a couple decades ago. It's nuts. Yeah. I didn't, like, as a child that we learned about him and it was just Guy Discovers America. Right. For us as kids. Yeah, we're not old.

Yeah. Well, keep saying that. But, yeah, I'm a fresh 82 and, you know, we're Taylor Swift's age roughly. So that makes me feel better. Yeah. As long as Taylor Swift is still hot, which is probably going to be the rest of her life, then I feel good about myself. Oh, nice. And I'm still the same age as a few professional athletes who haven't retired. Sure. There you go. You know. Yeah. Taylor Swift is my personal portrait of Dorian Gray, except in reverse, where I assume she's probably not going to age while I do. Oh, there you go. Yeah. Right. Anyways, what we're talking about. Yeah, Columbus.

You know, we just learned that he was the guy who, like, discovered America. And it also wasn't very clear that, like, he was not landing on Plymouth Rock. Like, I remember him thinking he was, like, discovered North America, which was not really true. A hundred percent. They always implied he landed in, like, Virginia or something. Right. But he landed in the Caribbean. And I think people in the U.S. don't want to think of that as being the start. Sure.

Yeah. But anyway, that was one big part of the super specific essay by a super specific guy that created the Intera Bang. It really shocked me how much Christopher Columbus was in it. Right, right. And, yeah, not an Italian-American as far as I can tell. But a guy who was in advertising, but also a massive enthusiast for typography to the point that he edited a bi-monthly magazine called Type Talks entirely about typography. Wow. So then the editor Martin K. Spector allowed the writer Martin K. Specter to propose the entire bank in the magazine.

That is, I mean, how big was the readership? It seems like tiny but influential. Huh. Well, I mean, I guess if the people who are in charge of this stuff where it's like five people, then they would each individually be quite influential because literally no one's devoting their time to figuring this stuff out except these guys. That's right. Yeah. And they just declared themselves huge typography fans and that's how it worked.

That's, you know what? Good for them. they know what they like that too like it's as hobbies go as passions go great like I don't know you're not hurting anybody cool yeah yeah and the key source for this takeaway are the previously cited book by Simon Garfield called Just My Type and then another book it's called shady characters the secret life of punctuation symbols and other type of graphical marks it's by Keith Houston I appreciate that one that's a good one both these books are excellent and then the other source here is the New York York Times obituary of Martin K. Spector. He passed away in 1988. Okay. And he was an American advertising executive with maybe one of the most niche ad firms on top of his niche hobby. In 1956, he opened his own firm with the most boring possible name of Martin K. Spector associates. I mean, Spector is a little, like, spooky.

Like, you know, a Spector, whoa. Yeah, it's spelled a way of never seen. It's spelled S-P-E-C-K-T-E-R. Yeah, he's a rebel. Yeah, it's unusual, yeah. An iconoclast for icons. Haina, and then most of their client base was super specifically print media businesses often about finance. Like, their top buyer was the Wall Street Journal. Wow. I borderline can't imagine what advertising work there is for this. Because, like, the Wall Street Journal, subscribers. But the other clients were stuff like the Dow Jones News Service, the financial magazine named Barron's, and then a newspaper, but still kind of for fancy people called

The National Observer. Somehow he locked down the ad market for niche financial and news publications that only rich New Yorkers read. Right. I don't know what advertising there is to do really for that. Just that group gets that magazine, you know? Well, like sock garters. Salk garters mostly. Oh. Men's garters. The poshest madmen items. Yeah, right.

Right. God, we made a mistake getting rid of men's garters personally as a woman. Bring them back. Let me see a little garter on that hairy leg, guys, fellas, businessmen. I feel like we're about to get weird pitches from advertisers. It's all in a circle. Weirder, the better. The modern Martin K. Spectors will reach out. Right. Exactly.

So, yeah, so he built an extremely small ad agency where he's his own boss doing an extremely specific kind of work and then gave himself a bunch of spare time to write and speak and gather with other typography fans. He wrote a book he published in 1971 called Disquisition on the Composing Stick. the composing stick is like a long tray that you put pieces of font in for typesetting that's only one of my questions disquisition on the composing stick disquisition on the composing stick disquisition so what's Alex at the risk of sounding stupid what's a disquisition yeah it's like a meandering lecture basically okay well that kind of does sound like that what that is.

Did I ever tell you about the time that I got into a little bit of a sticky situation with my composing stick? Our minds are so aligned. This title read so dirty to me, even though it's not. Like, there was some kind of penis element that I couldn't quite place it. Well, composing stick. I mean. Yeah, and disquisition.

Like, there's something there. Disquisition. Yeah. It's the squizz and squisition that doesn't. I think. Yeah. It just sounds like something some older generation would like use as a euphemism for, you know, a wiener a la disco stick.

Yes. And yeah, it was published by a publisher named typophiles Incorporated. Typophiles were, okay. Yeah. They're not beaten the pervert allegations just yet. Yeah, and then also, for almost a decade, while he was running an entire ad agency, Martin K. Specter became the editor of Type Talks magazine, which published an issue every two months about nothing but typography. This guy was so all in on the typography hobby, on top of being all in on one of the most niche forms of advertising possible. It seems like he was basically known across Fancy Manhattan as the king of typography and, uh,

fancy ideas. Everyone tries to make a name for themselves somehow. Yeah, and he just loved this thing, too. Like, again, I'm telling you about it being phallic and stuff, but it's really just harmless and nice that he liked this. I should be kinder to him. As opposed to other fallacies, which are incredibly not harmless, and they're out to get you. Yeah.

Like the Washington Monument, that thing could fall down on you at any point. Anytime. Watch your six. you're in that big field it's in or whatever. And your seven. Hey, see, I'm rolling with the kids. Whoa. I'm 802.

I don't know what that means. I should have chosen the fake age of 67. Then we could have done allow with it. Yeah. It's very funny. Good job, kids. Yeah, I looked up what it means and it means nothing. Great job.

No, it's just a good job. So anyway, Martin K. Specter. in this incredibly specific life he constructed for himself, he published his own idea. In the February and March, 1962 issue of Type Talks magazine, he published his own essay titled Making a New Point or How About That? Dot, Dot, Dot, Dot. That's good. It's all good. That's such a good title. Yeah, and the entire essay is pitching the Intara Bang. He also suggested the name in the essay, but suggested more than one option and wasn't dogmatic. about it being called an interrobang.

All right. A man of the people, knowing that there should be a democratically appointed name for this. Yeah, yeah. He was open to whatever people settle on is good. But he wanted the main purpose of English language writing needs a character that's both the functions of a question mark and an exclamation point. He labored over the essay and he also hired his own ad agency's art director to draw concept art of a few different letter forms. I took pictures of a book where they are And I'll upload them for folks

I'm looking at them And I do think they messed up on the one they picked Because there's some of these that I actually like quite a bit better Yes, me too There's a lot less of the smushy ligature And his real ideas Like a much more loopy question mark Where it's a lot clearer

It's almost like a dollar sign in a good way It's great Right Yeah Yeah my favorite one I think It's the last one on figure 2.1 Where it's like It's basically like a straight-ish line and then a curly on the end, sort of almost like a stylized B, but not quite with a dot under it.

Lowercase B, yeah. Yeah. And this one to me is the best because it's easy to write. It's not muddled. And it gets both of those shapes in there in one smooth motion. I think it would maybe be used more if we picked that one, in my opinion. that one and also some of the ones that look like a hot air balloon with a dot those are cute they're clear those are really cute i like those cute and they're clear yeah yeah so it's kind of odd

that he had much better ideas for how to write this than the public settled on in a way that seems crucial and one very worst idea which is the one that's just like a question mark and a exclamation point stacked on top of each other yeah it does it does look like one's mounting the other, and I don't, I'm not into it. Yeah. Yeah, let's just make it taller and harder to write. Yeah. So, yeah, so this essay across the board is pretty normal. I know I emphasize the Columbus thing, but he brings up in particular phrases like, how much or the phrase, you're not serious as like valid times for using the intara bang. Right. And then suddenly there's a massive of digression about Columbus.

I'll quote it here for folks. And this is just part of it. Quote, to this day, we don't know exactly what Columbus had in mind when he shouted, Land Ho. And to be clear, it's written with a period at the end there. Most historians insist that he cried, land ho! But there are others who claim it was really land ho? Chances are the intrepid discoverer was both excited and doubtful.

but neither at that time did we nor even yet do we have a point which clearly combines and melds interrogation with exclamation end quote i mean yeah i think uh i think we all know what he meant when he was saying land ho that columbus guy but uh he he's not even sure if it's land it could just be a really big whale Yeah, he's a dumb guy, a replacement level person. But truly recently, people were like, this is the most important person in the history of the United States. We really loved Columbus for a while. Mostly, I think, because of the hat, because he has a weird hat. It's good. The hat, I'm into it. It's great.

The hat didn't commit any crimes. Yeah. If we got an interrobang out of this whole sort of erroneous history of this guy, who could say it's bad that we lionized this heinous criminal. Right. And the entire origin of this symbol is extraordinarily specific. Like one of the most niche people in all of 1962 America, an extremely specific and clear origin on like most things in culture and writing and then a sudden

Columbus digression. It's all, it's all so weird. I mean, it is, it's a niche, it's a niche punctuation mark, so it makes sense a niche person did it. Yes. And on the plus side, it seems like everybody forgot the Columbus part of the pitch. They stuck to the regular reasons for doing it. Columbus never came up again. Because it could be just as, you could deploy it to anyone making a discovery, right? right you know like when ben franklin like used the key to collect some of the lightning energy um and he went wow wow wow honestly most people in history are feeling inquisitive and exclamatory in the big moments you know so yeah yeah and the interior bang basically fits every historical event worth writing down in a book

Yeah, no, it's true. Like, I'm president? Yes, George Washington, you're the president. Yeah. And then because this guy was sort of a niche, well-known figure in his own circles in Manhattan, that led to a strange takeaway number two. 1960s New York media fell in love with the Intara Bang and accidentally made it seem like an April Fool's joke. Ah, that was that because it was on April 1st?

This character got a bunch of rave reviews, but one of the first rave reviews published on April 1st, 1962. Okay. Yeah, that's always, you never want to do a press release on April 1st unless it's, it is a goof. It's like such an unforced error. And we truly don't know exactly why. But yeah, it happened. Yeah, well. Because, again, Martin K. Specter, he was basically.

word nerd Don Draper. He was the leading Madison Avenue ad man of obsessing about typography. Everyone in New York knew this guy if they knew about that. Right. Did he also steal a man's identity? Oh, I wish. That would be fun. That would be fun.

I didn't watch a lot of Madman. I just kind of knew that. He invented Don Draper and he used to be something like Eugene Schmedley or something. Yeah, like Dick Whitman. Yeah. Took me a second to remember it. It's kind of the weirdest part of Mad Men. The show almost doesn't need it.

I think the problem with that, if I could go on a digression, is that establishing someone's character, like, you have to do that really early on. You have to loop the audience in quite early on. Having it be a twist doesn't really work because you need character building and growth throughout the whole series. And if you're just like, and by the way, he's a mysterious guy who's fake. You know, it can work. It's just tough to pull off. Anyways, Seymour Skinner. Yeah.

Yeah, and Martin K. Specter, he was just looped in enough with especially big-time writers and newspaper publishers, who also tend to be word nerds because writers like words, sure. That meant that there was immediate, bigger media interests beyond March 1916. 62's issue of Type Talks magazine that's for no one. Sure, there's, there are bigger issues than that. I would agree with that. Within a month, it got a feature in the Wall Street Journal, maybe partly because that's a Spector client, also in the New York Herald Tribune newspaper, then later coverage in Time Magazine and Newsweek, and at a time when those are massive publications,

like not like today. And then also it got picked up in a font that made news. Apparently, in the run-up to the U.S. bicentennial, which wouldn't be until 1976, some people at a company called American-type founders wanted to sort of get a jump on everybody and make the font of the bicentennial, like a new font to honor 200 years of the United States. I mean, that is like when I think honoring the United States, I do think new font. And so 10 years ahead of time in 1966, they released a font called Americom. And typographer Richard Isbell made Americana the first ever font to have an official in Tarabang in it. Okay. Hey, there you go. Soft launch. Hard launch, medium launch. Launching it.

Kind of all of the above because every other font has a question mark and an exclamation point. You can just generate it. But they specifically put it in a set of characters. Right. And then also two years later, 1968, a typewriter manufacturer hurried to be the the first ever typewriter with an intarabang key. It was the Remington Rand Company. They put it on their Model 25 electric typewriter and raved about themselves kind of capturing the zeitgeist of 1968 and the march to the future. Right.

So, wait, is that the same Remington as makes the guns? Yeah, they pivoted to also and then primarily making typewriters because they know how to do complicated small machine parts. So they make multiple types of bangs. Yeah, Interabang, attack a bang, you know, all the things. This does kind of make me think of like when you have those like remotes, like TV remotes where it's like it adds buttons like Disney Plus and Netflix. Like you get a whole button for it and it's like it does feel a little bit. I don't know, try hard to be relevant. I agree.

And we'll talk in a bit about how the rest of the country kind of felt that way. Like competitors did not super chase Remington on this and try to also have an intarabang key on the typewriter. Right. And Remington said the most about this in an internal company newsletter. They told employees they were getting rave reviews, quote, from typographers who are said to commend it for its ability to express the incredibility of modern life, end quote. Ah, yes, the great and powerful typographer lobby. Right. The one demographic you must.

I suppose if you're making typewriters that that is your main demographic. Exactly. Like the people who care about this really were good at finding each other. Right. And did so and all talked about it. But it seems like the interior bang really didn't leak out of that very much. They tried. And then one big impediment to that was the timing of a newspaper article.

Because one of the biggest raves immediately came from writer Joseph K. Salo in the New York Herald Tribune newspaper, which was still big at the time. He called the Intera Bang, quote, true genius and devoted an entire giant newspaper column to how great the Entera Bang is. But for some reason, they published at April 1, 1962. too. It also, like, if you're raving about the genius of the interrobang, it's a little hard to be credulous and take that seriously. Exactly. Like, it's kind of funny on any date. And then, Keith Houston says, we don't know exactly why it ran that day. Maybe nobody thought about it. Maybe Casela's editor thought he was kidding. And there was a disconnect, you know? Right. That makes sense to me.

And, like, the shape's kind of funny of the Intera Bang. The name's kind of funny. funny. And like you said, it's just funny to rave about a goofy punctuation mark. Well, that it's genius. That's, like, I would say it's neat. Muted praise makes way more sense and feels less. Like, it feels like he was satirizing the thing. He was how excited he was. Yeah. The polio vaccine is genius. The interrobing is kind of cool. Yeah. Also, like, Like, 1962, so many earth-shattering and amazing pieces of news are happening, like space launches and stuff. Right. Yeah. We're like getting up to the moon. It's like, yes, but we have combined the exclamation point and question mark. You don't have to put one after the other. They don't, they no longer must be sequential. It can be one symbol. Yeah, like you're a couple of years from the Beatles arriving. Like, there's so much happening. And this is dumb.

Compared to that. I mean, no, it's very important to some people. Apparently that newspaper article sparked a bigger version of what might have happened no matter what, which is just people assuming Martin K. Spector is kidding and the entire thing's a joke. Right. Sure. All Martin K. Spector could do is clarify that he's not kidding in the next issue two months later of Type Talks magazine. That clarification did not get around. Oh, no.

just a huge article. No, I'm not kidding. Yes, like he literally was saying stuff about how he takes all typography very seriously, and it's his passion. And unfortunately, only fellow geeks read that. And so the Interior Bank's always been dogged by this comedy accusation and comedy vibe. Yeah, I think even if it wasn't published on April 1st, there might still be a little bit of a comedic element to it. But that certainly did not help. And folks, that's our numbers and two big takeaways. We're going to punctuate here, then share lots more takeaways about the fall and further rise and fall again of the interrobang. An ellipses, if you will. Ooh, yeah. Feel a dot, dot, dot, dot while we go away for a second.

Sure. Feel it. Feel it. That's a dot. Dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. We're back, and we have two more takeaways about this little punctuation mark, starting with takeaway number three. The Intera Bang basically vanished within 10 years of its invention, and the internet temporarily

brought it back. Hmm. Okay, so I can see why it vanished, because everyone thought it was a joke. and we didn't really need it. Exactly. Yeah, this was almost exclusively a fad of the 1960s. And then also it is temporarily back with us in a way that might fade again because of the internet. Right.

So this is the fall and rise and fall again of the Intera Bang. All right. And it shall rise again. Yeah, we might be at the tail end of the second fad of interrobangs. The zenith? I don't actually know what a zenith is. Is that a nadir? Are we at the nadir or the zenith?

We might be waning. Weaning from zenith to nadir. Is this a waning gibbis or a waxing waning? I know. I jump to moon terms. Maybe it's because we're talking about the 60s and the Apollo missions or, you know, I don't know. I'm a Neil Armstronging this. It's a very moon era.

Yeah, yeah. The moon was big back then. Right. Like we're sending humans into space and this New York Herald Tribune writer is trying to be like, but look at a punctuation mark a guy made up. Yeah, it seemed like a joke. I mean, but also it could have helped like it could have been one small step for man. True. Yeah. It seems like it just didn't fit how Neil Armstrong said it, but another guy might have said it that way. Yeah. Yeah. Neil Armstrong also messed up. He's supposed to say one small step for a man. So maybe if he had learned a little more grammar. right that is a fact yeah he messed up so yeah screwed up because it doesn't make sense because if you say one small step for man one giant leap for mankind you're being redundant but what he meant to say was one small step for a man meaning himself a little step one giant leap for mankind meaning the advancement of technology that got him there yeah what was the word we used for trying to think after 11 p.m. frontle I feel like after you land on the moon you're really on the frontal zone

He really had a frontal zone moment. Yeah, he was in the frontal zone. He was like, oh, he's probably jet lagged. The most jet. Rocket. Rocket lagged. Yeah. And key sources for this are the previously cited books and also a wonderful show from BBC Radio 4.

It's called Word of Mouth. Host Michael Rosen interviewed nonfiction writer and typography expert Florence Hazrat, who talked all about, especially the exclamation point playing a wrong. here. As soon as the interrobang was invented and becoming popular, it also pretty much went away. And as you said, Katie, the big reasons are that we can do it with what's already on a keyboard. And then the other reason is that it had a lack of a track record compared to some other characters that were also jostling for a key on keyboards. Who were these other characters that were in the lineup?

One good example is what I mentioned before, the A and the E put together, an Ash character. where there's a ligature between them. Like, that character dates back more than a thousand years. It also continues to be used in Danish, in Norwegian, and a few other Scandinavian languages. It's been replaced in Swedish by that character that's an A with an Oomlaude over it. And then in English, we just started typing the A and the E separately. Right. But, like, that dates back to around the 700s A.D. or earlier.

And people making keyboards still said, you can just type an A and E. Yeah. So compared to that, the Interabang from 1962, people said, you can type a question mark in an exclamation point. We're trying to make condensed keyboards here. Cut it out. Did you ever read the Philip Pullman novels, the Golden Compass? Yeah, he uses it all the time. He uses the ash thing.

Yeah. Yeah. For the demons. For demons. But it's just pronounced demons, so it's a little pretentious. I thought it was Damon like forever. Yeah, daimons. Daimans.

Daimans. Yeah, no, it was just demons. And then Brenda asked me why I was talking that way about this book series she loves. I was like, oh. Who's Damon? Matt Damon? Damon. Wayans or something.

In those book, everyone had a little Matt Damon as their sort of representation of their soul to follow them around. And that instead of Mrs. Colter, it's that joke Jimmy Kimball does where he pretends to hate Matt Damon. That's the villain. It's a really weird book. And there were some typography fans and journalists and publishers on a few streets in Manhattan, who all talk to each other about how great and tarabangs are. And other than one Americana font, one Remington typewriter, most of the rest of the business and type world kind of moved on and said,

we're doing a lot all at once. Keyboards don't need a key for this. Sure. I agree with that, sort of. I mean, it's fun, but, you know. And even more than the Ash character, you can also go out of your way to type it on a typewriter if you want to. Sure.

You, like, you nudge it back and then you do it again. If you're that devoted to it, surely you have the time. Yeah. So for all those reasons, according to Keith Houston and Simon Garfield, The Intera Bang is created in 1962 and basically vanishes by 1971. Less than a decade. It's just like gone after people played with it in the 60s. It was a real flash bang in a pan.

Yes. And then even as computers and digital word processing expanded our font options and special characters, keyboards stayed the same size. Nobody really added a key for this. And then Internet writing. and kind of brought it back because of the looser grammatical norms of the internet. According to Florence Hazrat, people have just really run with the multi-character version of interrobangs since we started talking to each other online.

Right. So when you say multi-character use of the interrobang, just sort of like where we do, exclamation points and question marks together. Yeah, like to me, the name interrobanks still makes sense for that, even though it's not this special character. Like, we're generating it. Because, like, you can do it a few different ways. You can do, like, one after the other sort of sequentially,

where it's, like, exclamation point, question mark, and then you repeat that pattern. Or you do a bunch of exclamation points and a bunch of question marks kind of in chunks. Yeah. Yeah, I love the work of linguists like Gretchen McCullough, who focused on the Internet, and they talk about how you can do really rich stuff

with what appears to be mistyping. Like sometimes people do this in tarabang sequence of a bunch of question mark an exclamation point and then throw in a number one. Yeah. Because when you're shifting the one key, you get an exclamation point, but if you stop shifting, it's a one,

and then that can imply, like, almost like when Kermit the Frog types wildly with his arms, you were doing that. Yeah, that was a big thing. I remember that back in the early aughts where it was, that was a funny thing to do to indicate you're so frantic that you no longer have the capacity to type correctly. Yeah. So people like to generate that on purpose after it was invented by accidents,

like an authentic accident where you really get a one in there. So the internet has enriched the Ontario Bank, too. We can kind of do more by not smoohing the characters together. Yeah. It's also a great way to kind of pat out some space in your creative writing essays. And yeah. And then Florence Hazarat says this second fad of the interrobang could also go quickly, both because internet trends come and go quickly, and also because we've gained emoji. Right. Emoji are an arguably richer and more complex way to do big feelings in text. It's so interesting. I'm sure that this has been written about, but the both genera, And cultural differences in emoji usage, I've noticed that here, like in Italy, I've had to use more emojis. I didn't use to use them very often. But I use them more because otherwise with certain, with certain sort of, I guess, age groups, if you don't use them, you sound curt in texting. And I'm never curt or serious. So we're both millennial.

So I feel like millennials now use less, like we used to use a ton of, you know, word shortening things like acronyms. And I think we kind of stopped using that as much, like writing out full words and sentences more when we got older. Because it's almost like we associate it with being young, so we don't want to sound like teenagers, so we don't use it. But then the younger, the generation Z, who are adults, which is. shocking they're all they're in their 20s are more likely to use like abbreviations and it's not necessarily it doesn't necessarily denote immaturity right like it's not like oh this is like a teenager thing to do 100% yeah and we'll talk more about it in the bonus that the components of the interrobang especially help us express emotion in a very flat context of digital life right and

Also, the interrobang is like vaguely angry compared to some of the options for that. And so it really seems like the second fad is on the way out if it isn't already of typing the multi-character enterabang. It's probably going to disappear again. And we might need a whole third communication medium to bring it back a third time. It should be like once we can get our phones to spray smell at us, like a little bit of an acidic stink that spritzes right up your nose so that you know. if you're if you're trying to be a little acidic a little testy it like sports you with a little bit of lemon i like that the smell of phone feels like such an april fool's claim too sure if we invent it nobody's can't believe it now i need to like uh write a whole essay on how i'm dead serious in smellphones magazine edited by katie golden writer katie golden publisher katie golden yeah special thanks to cookie

But otherwise the whole masthead is just you. Cookie's my main. Yeah. Man, she loves smelling stuff. The worst stuff. The nastiest business. Oh, a dog should be the editor-in-chief, actually. Yeah.

Yeah, they love smelling. They're amateurs. Our walks now are mostly just letting her smell stuff. She's old. She's 13. She's tired. So she mostly just wants to kind of trundle about and just smell pretty much everything. Yeah, that's correct.

Yeah. It's cool. Smells is cool. Sometimes I open the windows for the cats, purely for smells, not even because I want to change the temperature or the wind or whatever. Yeah, yeah. No, Cookie loves her balcony time where she gets to just like smell stuff. Yeah, that's great. And yeah, and we have a whole final takeaway that sort of reverses this idea that the Ontario Bank's about to die. Also, some listeners might have been wondering why we hadn't mentioned it yet. Takeaway number four. the most expressive and useful version of the intara bang might come from chess notation.

Chess notation. And they tend to use a multi-character just two thing, where it's one question mark, one exclamation point. But it turns out many chess notation systems use two different versions of the multi-character in tarabang with a different meaning, whether the question marks first, or the exclamation marks first. Whoa. Okay. And so that might stick around because that's an extraordinarily clear and specific usage that you really don't see anywhere else in writing.

All right. I mean, I know the horsey go in an L, but otherwise I'm not like a chess grandmaster. Yeah. And listeners don't need to be. Basically, we're talking about the chess notation you'll see if you look up a shorthand-written version of all the moves in a chess game. Okay. The main name for that formatting is algebraic notation. It's the notation where each chess square has a letter and number name.

Right. Like the eight by eight board, it's eight letters and then eight numbers. Right. For the horizontal or vertical. So you can go night to B seven and then the other person goes like, really, you want to do that? And then I go, yeah, totally. But hang on.

I was just testing you. actually. I was just testing you actually. Let me, uh, that's not my real move. So then, so it, so I understand the like sync your battleship type matrix system for chess. I've never heard of the exclamation point and question mark used in that context, though. I hadn't really either. A friend of ours, hi Paul. He like brought it up the other day. Because like it turns out with chess notation, there's a bunch of objective notes for, like they move the piece to this square. And then that there's a spectrum of it where it ranges into some borderline totally

subjective notation, which is where we start getting in tarabangs. Because there's like extra characters for like a plus sign when you put the king in check, a hashtag for checkmate. But then you start to get into one are called commentary marks where the person writing down the moves is giving their opinion about whether the move is good or not. Okay. Okay. And on the relatively objective side, especially if they're noting after the match is all the way over, so you know whether the moves worked or not, there's a note for a good move, which is one exclamation point. Hmm. And then a great move gets two exclamation points. Meanwhile, a mistake gets one question mark and what's called a blunder gets two question marks.

Huh. Okay. And like if the match is over, you can be pretty objective about it. Like you can say this is where they lost two question marks. Marks, you know, sure. Okay. Yeah. That's actually very passive-aggressive. I love it. Like, really? You did that, did you?

Yeah, this whole notation system also reminds me of baseball box scores where there's little notes like that. But those are almost entirely objective and the only subjective one is errors in fielding. Right. Like you're deciding whether they should have caught it or not. And maybe it was a hard play. Maybe it was an easy play. Was it like in cartoons where they tried to catch.

it but the ball was going so fast it like blew a hole right through their glove and their hand that's kind of smoking slightly or did they just bungle it and then the scorers like if the outfield are tunneled like bugs bunny they would have caught it easily so that's an error sure should have done the bugs bunny yeah so so that's basically the the question mark is like you screwed up and then if you do more than one question mark it's like you really screwed up yes exclamation point did well. And if you do more than one exclamation points, like you did really well. Exactly. And so I find those relatively objective because chess is literally black and light. You win or don't with super specific rules. Yeah. Yeah. It didn't even mean to get there,

but there we are. And so then beyond that, there are two further what are called annotation symbols that are truly opinion driven. And it is two versions of the multi-character in Terabang. It's either a exclamation point followed by a question mark or a question mark followed by an exclamation point. Okay. So do they mean opposite things? Yes. What matters is which character comes first.

If it's a question mark first, it means just entirely the opinion of the person taking notes. They think the move is dubious and they're curious if the player is doing something brilliant that they are not seeing yet. Right, right. So they're like putting a question mark, but caveating it with an exclamation point. Like also you're a grandmaster. Maybe it is going somewhere. Right.

And then the opposite, an exclamation point first followed by a question mark is an even weirder claim. It's that the note taker thinks that the move is interesting and thinks it's interesting in an exciting way, but is questioning whether it was the best move. Right, right. So the first one, question mark first, is. is like, this seems stupid, but I know this person has a good track record. So, like, maybe they're actually going for something really cool.

Yeah. The second one is like, okay, I see what you're doing. But is that really the best choice? Yeah, the second one, it's that and almost more of a just the meaning of it in Tara Bang, where you're like, whoa. And asking a question, too. Like, the word that usually gets assigned to it is interest. Right.

Like, this is simply an interesting choice. Right. And I can't quite follow it as a note taker. It might be good or bad, and it's beyond me. Sure. And I find both those notations very rich in meaning. Yeah. Even if the intarabang in all forms disappears from most writing, I think chest notation will

keep it going in this two different meanings way. I love how sassy it is. I had no idea that chess notation. could be have so much sass and so few characters same I kind of thought it was like baseball box scores where it's pretty objective right like even even when somebody marks an error in baseball they're not really trying to be mean or anything you know they're just saying missed it you know messed up yeah bad catch bad throw it's a lot it's a lot of attitude it's like I don't know you really want to do that right they're like okay Kasparov but then you check and it it is a Gary Kasparov match this isn't right a figure of speech or something that he's probably going to win right folks that's the main

episode for this week welcome to the outro with fun features for you such as help remembering this episode with a run back through the big takeaways takeaway number one Interabangs were created by a specific guy on a specific date, Martin K. Specter in 1962, and he pitched it in his own magazine as punctuation for Christopher Columbus discovering America. Takeaway number two, 1960s American media fell in love with the Interabang,

and one newspaper accidentally made it feel like an April Fool's joke forever. Takeaway number three, the Intara Bang basically vanished within 10 years of its invention, and it's gained a second fad life through the internet. Takeaway number four, the most expressive and useful and complex version of the interabang is in chess notation. And then lots of numbers before all that about ligatures in writing of characters, about nine alternate names for the intera bang, and more. Those are the takeaways.

Also, I said that's the main episode, because there's more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now, if you support this show at maximum fun.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists, so members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus show is the bizarre several centuries when exclamation marks were unpopular. Visit sifpod.f.pod.fund for that bonus show for a library of more than 22 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows and a catalog of all sorts of Max Fun

bonus shows. It's special audio. It's just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at maximum fun.org. Key sources this week include two wonderful

books about punctuation on typography and more. Just My Type A Book About Fonts is by Simon Garfield. Shady Characters, The Secret Life of Puntuation, symbols and other typographical marks is by Keith Houston. We also relied on a BBC Radio 4 show. It's called Word of Mouth.

They did an episode hosted by Michael Rosen, interviewing nonfiction writer and typography expert, Florence Hasrat. That page also features resources such as native-land.claan.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenape Hoking, the traditional land of the Muncie Lenape people and the Wappinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skategoke people and others. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy, and I want to acknowledge that in my location, in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, native people are very much still here.

That feels worth doing on each episode and join the free SIF Discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about native people and life. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord, and hey, would you like a tip on another episode, because each week I'm finding is something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 166. That's about the topic of tattoos. Fun fact there, recent UK royals and recent Russian czars had tattoos from Japan. So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast Creature Feature about animals, science, and more. our theme music is unbroken, unshaven by the Budoz band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand.

Special thanks to Chris Sousa for audio mastering on this episode. Extra, extra special thanks. Go to our members, and thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then. Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network

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