Some of the many jobs I do are calendars for various organizations. As such, I am a geek for the rather obscure holiday celebrations; National Karaoke Week anybody? (fourth week of April) That's why with much chagrin I must inform you that last Wednesday was National Punctuation Day (tip o' the hat to fathers' day celebrant Dan). So now I know why there's all the commas and interrobangs hanging around. I did notice an uptick in the use of exclamation marks banging all over a number of ad submissions lately.
"Business speak." Really, business people, you all need to learn English and not put four dots for ellipsis and not only is one exclamation point too many, four are right out for business communications and ads).
Anyway, I hope you all had a good one, and I, for one, had been running out of periods and do use comma splicing, and truncated semi-colons (full colons are just messy). Now I have enough periods to stop these out-of-control run-on sentences that have been plaguing my writing with their continuous digressions and sub-clauses which interfere with the proper flow of sentence structure and only serve to distract the reader while being a general nuisance to all and sundry (are we all blue in the face by now?).
And now I present my shout out to Dan. Saturday bang, bang, bang, bang. (Trust me, he's laughing right now).
3 comments:
I never heard of the Interobang before. There should be an Alt-sorta thing so I could type it from my keyboard.
Nathan, well, the more you know, you know.
Just to let everyone in on the joke, my domain name is saturdaybang.com because saturday.com was already taken and all the old hackers (and many typesetters) say 'bang' instead of 'exclmation point.' So I went with saturdaybang.com for my consulting domain.
And the tech supporter in me couldn't not post the following...
HTML - Use "‽" to get one. (‽)
Mac - Cmd-Option-T will get you the Character Palette (listed as "Special Characters..." in Safari), then select punctuation category and click on the interobang to enter it. Alternately, you can use the following directions "Mac OS X you need to enable the “Unicode Hex Input” keyboard layout (a one-time operation) and when you have, you can press ⌥+203D"
Windows - Enter '203d' and then hit Alt-X.
Source of all the above, http://virtuelvis.com/archives/2008/09/interrobang
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