interrobanging?!

For years I've been telling students you only get one mark of punctuation at the end of a sentence. Decide if you want it to be a question mark or an exclamation mark. You don't get two. The students might, of course, use the interrobang. It's a punctuation mark invented by Martin K. Spekter in 1962. The name comes from a combination of the question mark (interrogaton point) and the exclamation mark, called a bang in printer's jargon. The American Heritage Dictionary accepts the spelling interabang as well. The OED has no entry under either spelling. It's availabble in Wingdings 2 in Word. Merriam-Webster says interrobang rhymes with oragutan, but it's a slant rhyme at best. Here's a great article about the interrobang from Shady Characters: the secret life of punctuation.

commas

(thanks to Kim, Phoebe's mom, in St. Augustine)

sarcmark

Now you've got a new punctuation mark to express your sarcasm.

;

"People have lost fortunes and even been put to death because of imprecise punctuation involving semicolons in legal papers. In 2004, a court in San Francisco rejected a conservative group’s challenge to a statute allowing gay marriage because the operative phrases were separated incorrectly by a semicolon instead of by the proper conjunction."  (thanks to John in Dania Beach)