Odd words: Interrobang

INTERROBANG/ˈɪnˈtɛrəʊbæŋ/
A combined exclamation mark and question mark.

This punctuation mark is not yet standard, and probably never will be. It was invented in 1962 through the actions of Martin Speckter, head of a New York advertising agency. He felt that advertising people needed a mark that combined a question with a shout, that mixture any parent produces at stressful moments: “You did WHAT?!”. His idea was to provide a marker for the rhetorical questions so much favoured by advertising copywriters. He asked readers of his magazine Type Talks to suggest a name for the character, and chose interrobang from among the resulting entries. It combined interrogation, for the question mark, with bang, an old printer’s term for the exclamation mark, a usage since taken over into computing (along with pling and shriek from other sources). Alas, though interrobang received some attention at first, it has never caught on, though for a brief period in the 1960s it was added to a few typewriter keyboards. However, it is not dead: its name appears in a couple of American dictionaries, it is in one Windows symbol font I know of, and it is also in the Unicode character set