In 1962, an advertising man decided the question mark needed help.

His name was Martin K. Speckter. He ran an advertising agency in New York and edited a small typography magazine called TYPEtalks. This was a profession in which people spent serious amounts of time worrying about whether a sentence should end with one tiny black mark or another. There are worse ways to make a living.

Speckter had noticed a problem. Advertising copywriters liked rhetorical questions. They still do. A question can pull a reader into a sentence in a way a declaration cannot. But sometimes the question mark did not quite carry enough weight. The sentence was technically a question, yes, but it also contained surprise, disbelief, challenge, maybe even a small amount of indignation.

You want how much for that car?

The words did some of the work. The question mark did some more. But something was missing.

Writers had already found a workaround. They simply put a question mark and an exclamation point next to each other.

Like this?!

It worked. Sort of.

Speckter thought we could do better.

In the March-April 1962 issue of TYPEtalks, he proposed a new punctuation mark. Instead of placing the question mark beside the exclamation point, he put them together. One mark. One dot. The curve of the question mark wrapped around the straight stroke of the exclamation point.

‽

He called it the interrobang.

The name was nearly as good as the mark.

"Interro" came from interrogatio, the Latin root associated with questioning. "Bang" was printers' slang for the exclamation point. Question and exclamation. Curiosity and surprise. Both occupying the same piece of ground.

Speckter was serious about it, although not so serious that he could not enjoy the absurdity of inventing punctuation.

People noticed, and readers sent TYPEtalks their own designs and suggested other names. There were proposals like interrapoint and exclarogative, the sort of words that make interrobang suddenly seem inevitable.

For a while, it looked as though Speckter might actually pull this off. The mark escaped the pages of his magazine and entered the wider world. Newspapers and magazines wrote about it. American Type Founders included an interrobang in its Americana typeface in the 1960s. Remington Rand even made it available on a typewriter.

Think about what that meant: somebody decided this strange new mark deserved a key.

Punctuation does not change very often. We inherit these little marks so completely that they feel less like inventions than geological formations. The comma was here before us. The period will be here after us. Nobody arrives at the office Monday morning and announces that Accounting has developed a replacement for the semicolon.

Yet for a brief period, the interrobang had momentum. Then the excitement faded. Typographers moved on. Writers kept typing ?! when they felt strongly enough about something, and most of the time they settled for one mark or the other.

By the 1970s, the interrobang was largely a curiosity, though it never completely died. That may be my favorite part of the story.

The mark survived in certain typefaces, in dictionaries, among designers and people who care perhaps a little too much about punctuation. Eventually it received a place in Unicode, meaning the digital world made room for a symbol the analog world had mostly forgotten.

You can type it today.

‽

Waiting.

Part of it is simply that it should not have survived. The world is very good at discarding things that fail to become standard. The interrobang somehow avoided both success and extinction. It became a kind of punctuation coelacanth, occasionally surfacing to remind us it was still down there.

But there is something else.

Most of working life has plenty of exclamation points.

We have goals.

Deadlines.

Priorities.

Initiatives.

Deliverables.

Transformation!

We are rather good at announcing what must be done.

The question mark is more troublesome.

Why are we doing this?

Who decided this was necessary?

What problem are we actually solving?

Could we stop doing this entirely?

These questions should move the work forward; they are no excuse for sitting in the back of the room with folded arms while somebody else tries to get something done.

A good question should move. That is what Speckter accidentally captured.

The interrobang does not merely question. It leans forward.

It says: Wait. What?!

There is surprise in it, and curiosity with enough edge to interrupt the room. More importantly, there is energy. The question is going somewhere.

Because the most useful person in a meeting is not necessarily the one with the fastest answer. Sometimes it is the person who notices that everyone has spent forty-five minutes answering a question nobody thought to examine.

The same thing happens on factory floors, inside government offices, in banks, hospitals, technology companies and probably wherever two people have created a spreadsheet and a third has been assigned to maintain it.

Eventually the process becomes the reason for the process. Someone needs to ask why, just long enough to make sure we are still solving the right problem.

Martin Speckter tried to give that instinct a punctuation mark in 1962. The world mostly declined, but I think he was onto something.

Some things deserve a comeback. This publication is one small attempt to bring a better question back to work.