Proposed interrobangs from Type Talks, March-April 1962, as drawn by Jack Lipton Speckter was also the editor of the typography magazine TYPEtalks, so in March of 1962, in an article for the magazine titled “Making a New Point, Or How About That…”, Speckter proposed the first new mark of English language punctuation in 300 years: the interrobang. Got milk?! Where’s the beef?! Can you hear me now?! So he asked himself: could there be a mark that made it clear (visually on a page) that something is both a question and an exclamation?! In the spring of 1962, Speckter was thinking about advertising when he realized something: many ads asked questions, but not just any questions - excited and exclamatory questions - a trend not unique to his time. He and his wife, Penny, collected hundreds of printing presses of all kinds and sizes. Speckter was also a typography nerd, constantly reading books on punctuation and the English language. In the 1950s and 60s, he repped some of the biggest names in publishing, such as Barron’s, Dow Jones, and the Wall Street Journal. It was created by an ad man named Martin Speckter just over a half-century ago. Producer Joe Rosenberg’s Americana Monotype interrobang, image by Vivian Le One such example has made it into dictionaries: the interrobang (‽). There have, however, been attempts to expand this typographical toolkit, and include other end marks. Ever since, we’ve ended our sentences with one of these three ancient marks, called end marks. And in the 8th century, Alcuin of York, an English scholar in the court of Charlemagne, quietly introduced a symbol that would evolve into the modern question mark. Medieval scribes gave us the earliest forms of the exclamation mark. These rhetorical units eventually lent their names to the comma, colon and period we know today. And a complete thought - followed by the longest pause - was called a periodos. A partial thought - followed by the shortest pause - was called a comma. Dots of ink at the bottom, middle, or top of a given line served as subordinate, intermediate and full points, corresponding to pauses of increasing length.Īristophanes’ system became the basis for Western punctuation. In the 3rd century BCE, a librarian in Alexandria named Aristophanes introduced the idea of putting in dots to indicate pauses, like stage directions for people performing texts out loud. Sometimes, this never-ending string of letters would execute what was called an ox-turn, first reading left to right, then switching to read back from right to left. Scriptio continua was the dominant form of writing for the Greeks and the Romans. Vergilius Augusteus, Georgica, written with continuous wrapping script People were expected figure out sentences and clauses while reading aloud. For thousands of years, in some written languages, there was no space between words. In the beginning was the word, and the word was … well, actually, there was just one word … one long, endless word.
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