11 Weird Punctuation Marks You Never Knew Existed And What They Mean
Because sometimes periods, commas, apostrophes, question marks, exclamation points, colons, semi-colons, dashes, hyphens, quotation marks, brackets, braces, and parentheses just aren't enough.
Not only does it have an awesome name, but the interrobang is a substitute for something already commonly used as it is: the question mark, exclamation point combination (She said what?! You don't read OMG Facts?!) Sure, it doesn't accomplish anything new, but it absolutely looks cooler as a single glyph.
The backward question mark, or percontation point was proposed by Henry Denham in 1580 as an end to a rhetorical question, and was only used up until the early 1600's. It's so obscure, "percontation" isn't even a recognized work. But it'd be great to use in a snarky, condescending text when someone asks you something stupid.
The irony mark looks a lot like the percontation point, except its location is slightly different, as it is smaller, more elevated, and comes before the sentence, rather than after. Alcanter de Brahm introduced the idea in the 19th century, and in 1966 French author Hervé Bazin proposed a similar glyph in his book, Plumons l’Oiseau, along with 5 other new marks.
Among Bazin's other proposed new punctuations was the love point, comprised of two question marks that share a point. The intended use, as once could assume, is to denote a statement of affection or love, like "Happy anniversary, sweetheart [love point]" or "I had a great time with you tonight [love point]." Of course, it didn't take off because of its redundancy in noting something that's already been stated.
Bazin described the acclamation point as "the stylistic representation of those two little flags that float above the tour bus when a president comes to town." Acclamation is, by definition, a "demonstration of goodwill or welcome." So one could use it to say something like, "I'm so glad you're home [acclamationpoint]" or "Come over as soon as you're off work [acclamationpoint]."
If you want to say something with emphatic certainty or utmost conviction (hence the cross symbol), conclude your declaration with a certitude point - yet another of Bazin's designs.
The opposite of a certitude point, a doubt point is used at the end of a sentence to express a statement of, you guessed it, doubt.
The SarcMark (short for "sarcasm mark") was formulated, copyrighted and trademarked by Paul Sak. And while it's use has been finite and limited, he markets it as "The official, easy-to-use punctuation mark to emphasize a sarcastic phrase, sentence or message." Presumably, it didn't grow in use, because it takes the fun out of being sarcastic - for those that know how of course.
Like the SarcMark, the snarkmark is used to indicate that a sentence should be interpreted in a way different from its literal meaning - whether it be figuratively, metaphorically, or otherwise. Unlike the SarcMark though, this one is copyright free and easy to type: it's just a period followed by a tilde.
Have you ever wanted to express excitement or curiosity without having to end a sentence? All the time, I'm sure. Well, if so, the exclamation and question commas are the answer. A Canadian patent was submitted for both in 1992, but it fell through in 1995. So you can use them without fear of copyright infringement!