On a congruent note, California flops on compulsory English[1], the expressive void of the interwebs yawns at over a thousand emoji code points[2], and people actually think it's a great idea to champion patented punctuation marks[3] in everyday grammar. Can this guy[4] even spell his name yet?<p>[1] <a href="https://outline.com/Gea52v" rel="nofollow">https://outline.com/Gea52v</a><p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji</a><p>[3] <a href="https://www.google.com/patents/USD608820" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/patents/USD608820</a><p>[4] <a href="https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/i-can-text-you-a-pile-of-poo-but-i-cant-write-my-name" rel="nofollow">https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/i-can-text-you-a-pile-of...</a>
Proposals for an irony punctuation sign have been around since late nineteenth century. Stylistically, I prefer this relatively recent Dutch proposal¹.<p>But, as noted in the wikipedia articles, some feel that explicitly indicating when text is meant ironically defeats its purpose; irony is supposed to make you think.<p>1: The 'Het ironieteken van de CPNB' one the right: <a href="https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironieteken" rel="nofollow">https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironieteken</a>
I've seen these "non-standard" ones in practice:<p>?! - Shock and confusion "Apple did what?!"<p>/s - Sarcasm "wow, I'm happy /s"<p>(?) - Doubt "I think Mark said we was done (?)"
I occasionally use interrobang (?! - not sure if there is a unicode character), but the rest seem quite useless.<p>Also, this site doesn't let you copy text...WTF developers?
Try covering up the names of these while guessing what each is supposed to symbolize. Personally, I found some of these to be rather unintuitive and sometimes arbitrary.
Cool ideas, would love to see more... but this site itself seems unfortunately over-designed to me.<p>It's a slideshow-style listicle (These 10 Punctuation Marks Will Blow Your Mind!), forces you to click to the next one, and makes you scroll to see an example usage for each punctuation mark.
Some years ago I made the case for an interrocolon, the purpose of which I do not see addressed in that list: "when the direct object of an interrogative statement references an example, a URL or another statement in a follow-on block of text". I encounter uses for this all the time especially when texting.<p><a href="https://xefer.com/2008/03/interrocolon" rel="nofollow">https://xefer.com/2008/03/interrocolon</a>
The Artist Formerly And Then Again Known As Prince had his own single-character font just for rendering His Symbol, and his PR company send around copies of a floppy disk with Windows and Mac versions of the font, along with these instructions for writing about him:<p><a href="https://www.milk.com/wall-o-shame/bruce_font.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.milk.com/wall-o-shame/bruce_font.html</a><p><a href="http://anildash.com/2014/06/my-favorite-floppy-of-all-time.html" rel="nofollow">http://anildash.com/2014/06/my-favorite-floppy-of-all-time.h...</a><p><a href="https://parkerhiggins.net/2013/01/writing-the-prince-symbol-in-unicode/" rel="nofollow">https://parkerhiggins.net/2013/01/writing-the-prince-symbol-...</a>
How many of these are part of Unicode?<p>The download link just a font that uses the Unicode Private Use Area to display each of these glyphs, which is particularly disappointing for interrobang which I know has an entry at U+203D, but I'm not sure about the rest of them?
It seems people want a way to express emotion in something like a side-channel. Interpunction is fine for that, however we can't pronounce interpunction by itself and second interpunction can be placed only at specific points in the sentence (usually at the end). Emoji can be placed everywhere, however emojis can't be spoken out loud.<p>Lojban, a constructed language, has a very interesting feature: attitudinals: <a href="https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Lojban/Attitudinals" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Lojban/Attitudinals</a><p>An example from Wikipedia:<p>mlatu .ui (a cat! yay!)<p>English has also attitudinals however they belong to informal speech.
Much punctuation evolved organically from scribal shorthand. On the internet, I can see a contraction of /s into a symbol being one of the likeliest candidates for turning into punctuation.
How can someone seriously propose I put a copyrighted symbol in my text to let them know it's sarcastic? [rhetorical question device] I'll bet the world will be a better place if they profit off every sarcastic sentence someone writes. [sarcastic sentence device] If you're too dumb to work out what's sarcastic, why should you benefit from my help? [friendly period]<p>(nb. There's a missing "sarcastic sentence device", but I don't know where to put it, when it applies to a piece of punctuation.)
This site design is beautiful---in static form. The animations are utterly unnecessary though and detract from the presentation as well as get repetitive when scrolling from item to item.
Years ago I wrote a perfectly reasonable comment like /* WTF??!?!!?!???? */ and the old C compiler complained about "invalid trigraph". A syntax error in the middle of a comment!<p>Took me a while to figure out that "trigraph" was referring to some part of "??!?!!?!????" and not "WTF".
A couple of these reminded me of musical symbols I'd see on staffs and so they were already associated with something in my mind and couldn't be re-associated with whatever the authors wanted.<p>Aw hell, I'll just mark up my text with a bunch of musical punctuation. Throw pianos and fortes all over everything.
The interrobang is in notable use; of the rest, the question/exclamation commas would be useful and so clear in intent that I'd adopt them immediately if they were widely supported (fonts and keyboards.)