So, in 1962 (in a castle, during a lightning storm), he combined the exclamation point and the question mark to create what he called a “typographical shrug.” It looked like this: ‽

Fathom's take on the interrobang.

As editor of Type Talks magazine, Speckter held a contest on what to name the new symbol. “Exclamaquest” and “exclarotive” were close contenders, but “interrobang” won out. (Interrogatio is Latin for “a rhetorical question” and bang is printers’ slang for the exclamation mark.) Articles in several national publications heralded the new symbol. The Wall Street Journal said it was the perfect punctuation for sentences such as “Who forgot to put gas in the car?” In 1966, American Type Founders issued the Americana typeface which included the interrobang. It was even included as a key on Remington and Smith Corona typewriters of the period.

Specimen of Americana with interrobang shown at bottom right.

While combining two or more unrelated characters into one strangely functional form like an interrobang might be called “frankentype,” it is in fact called a “ligature,” from the Latin word ligare, meaning to bandage or bind. Although graphic designers rarely if ever use interrobangs, they do use other ligatures all the time. You do too, though you might not realize it.

A simple ligature that any school-child will recognize looks like this: w. We call it a “double-u” but there was a time when “u” was written like this “v” (easier to carve into stone that way) and a double-u was formed like this: vv. Some smarty-pants decided it would be best to just create a ligature for it, and the rest is history.

And who could forget this exciting ligature: &. That one started out as people writing “et” (Latin for “and”). Always in a rush, scribes smooshed the letters e-t together until they became a ligature that was stylized through Roman times into the ampersand as we know it. It wasn’t actually called an “ampersand” until the 1830s, when lazy English schoolchildren slopped together the words “and per se and” and it stuck. And that’s as far as we’ll be going down that road, because frankly the full, twisted tale would make your head hurt.

Evolution of the ampersand.

Other ligatures you may not recognize so easily are used secretly by graphic designers to eat up billable hours for the purpose of being generally invisible to the average person. Take this one for example: fi. No, that was not just “f” and “i” really close together. It was a ligature, a single letterform which sidesteps a potential typographic pileup with aplomb.

Johnson & Griffiths type logo created by Fathom showing "f-f-i" ligature. An actual single piece of type that would have traditionally been used to create this effect is shown above.

Seriously, though, there are times in logos and big ad headlines where a subtle ligature really brings things up a notch. Ligatures have been used since Sumerian cuneiform…whenever increased speed or clarity could be achieved by the creation of a new, combined character. So, is it any surprise that Mr. Speckter, an ad man, decided to try his hand by combining ? and ! into ‽ Think of the space that could be saved in headlines! It was the 60s, after all, and if we could put a man in space, why not this? And who better to do it than Martin Speckter, not just an ad man but the ad man who was also the author of that really very, very exciting book, Disquisition on the Composing Stick?

This is a composing stick, by the way, used to set type. To learn all about it, pick up Disquisition on the Composing Stick. Dare you!

History has treated the interrobang about as kindly as it has treated Esperanto. (⸘Vere‽) But yet, the interrobang lives on. It is the logo for the State Library of New South Wales, Australia, for example (though it might also be an appropriate symbol for “old” South Wales, where medieval conflict evidenced by castles every few miles [!] meets post-Thatcher economic recovery [?]).

This logo from down under is over the top!

Microsoft oddly provided several versions of the interrobang in its Wingdings 2 character set. And the interrobang survives in several fonts to this very day, including Calibri, the default font for Office 2007 (see how Microsoft knows how to OWN a trend just a few decades after it is no longer trendy‽).

Perhaps the interrobang is due for a resurgence. It all starts with us: we just have to use it.*

OMG, like, totally why not‽

* You can find an interrobang in Microsoft Word’s Fonts. Go to Format, choose Fonts, then Wingdings 2. You’ll find 4 different versions of the interrobang. Hit the ` key, the ] key, the 6 key, or the - key.