From: John D. Burger (john@mitre.org)
Date: Mon Sep 05 2005 - 19:55:49 CDT
John Hudson wrote:
> Peter, the whole point of the exclamation mark is precisely to
> distinguish an exclamation from an identically worded question: 'How
> nice!' vs 'How nice?' That *is* the grammatical function: to make
> clear the distinction between a question and an exclamation, because
> they are two different things.
Uh, I use a bang for lots more than those troublesome ambiguities
(which are how common, exactly?). Just because an exclamation mark
does serve to so disambiguate, I would hardly say that that's its
"whole point".
An exclamation mark is for exclamations, a question mark is for
questions. Hence the names. Some utterances are arguably both. A
canonical example might be:
WTF?!
I disagree entirely that interrobang is for utterances which are
either, but not both, as you said earlier.
None of which is to say that interrobang isn't a bit silly, and
inverted interrobang is even sillier. Let's encode INVERTED FULL STOP
while we're at it. (Please don't tell me if the latter is already in
Unicode - I don't want to know.)
- John D. Burger
MITRE
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