!?

In his entertaining book Shady Characters—a series of capsule "biographies," if you will, of various punctuation and typographical marks throughout history—Keith Houston devotes a chapter to the ill-fated mid–twentieth century campaign to promulgate and adopt a new punctuation mark—the "interrobang." It came about because strings of punctuation had begun to appear at the ends of sentences—"?!" and the like—particularly in the more informal idiom of advertising copy, and so the idea was to combine the two symbols into one.

Closing a sentence with a "?!" defied traditional grammatical practice, after all. Yet, there was a particular feeling and intonation these strings of characters conveyed that was not fully captured by either the question or the exclamation mark in isolation. The proposed way out of this dilemma was to invent a new character that could serve double-duty. The interrobang—a combination of question mark and exclamation—could convey the sense of a question being asked with incredulity and a rising tone of outrage—consternation is one of the apt words for it that appears in Houston's text. 

Perhaps inevitably, however, the new mark did not catch on. Houston explores a number of possible explanations for this, but I suspect the simplest is just that it was never really needed in the first place. And modish grammatical innovations that yield no real gain in efficiency never last for long. After all, popular usage had already found a solution to the underlying problem: namely, the simple writing out in succession of the two characters. 

It was no great difficulty to type "?!" The only people who really saw any problem in it were pedants and prescriptive grammar types, and they are always bound to lose in the end, for the simple reason that all grammar is arbitrary, and there is no intrinsic reason why a given set of rules should hold sway forever. "?!" conveyed its meaning perfectly well. Everyone knew how to read it and when to use it. And the test of linguistic success is always this and this alone—whether it works. (Besides, as Houston notes, the pedants and the prescriptive grammar types objected to the "interrobang" too, and on the same grounds that it was an innovation, so they were no fit constituency to defend it either). 

But there is one unresolved question about the interrobang issue that Houston does not address. Namely—once we have decided we are comfortable simply writing out multiple punctuation marks to cap a sentence—which of them should come first? Is it "?!"?! Or is it "!?"!? 

The answer might appear obvious to contemporary English readers. We are far more familiar with the "?!" formulation, the logic of which seems to be something as follows: the question mark indicates that the sentence from a grammatical standpoint is interrogatory; then, once the sentence is complete, we want to mark that it is asked in a spirit of consternation. We therefore add the exclamation mark afterward. 

Houston seems to follow this practice. When it comes time in the text for him to provide an example of his own devising ("Who would punctuate a sentence like that?!", he rhetorically asks) you will note he places the question mark first. However, the other examples he cites later on in the chapter deploy the characters in reverse order. "!?" appears more than once in the chapter's endnotes. So which should it be? 

Perhaps the reason a conclusive answer to this question has never been reached is because no one is willing to admit that using multiple closing punctuation marks is grammatically licit in the first place. Having been confined to outlaw status any way they turn, the combined characters have switched back and forth with the promiscuity of those who have nothing to lose. 

After all, the inclusion of multiple closing punctuation marks has long been associated with domains where the "rules" of prescriptive grammar do not apply, and efficacy holds sway as the only virtue: advertising copy, printed dialogue, etc. It is almost never seen in academic writing or elevated prose, but very often on billboards. 

And this in turn hints at what is probably the real source of the pedants' objections to it. The combination of multiple closing punctuation offends not only because it is new; but because it bears the stigma of the vernacular. To the prescriptive grammarian mind, it looks crass, vulgar, showy, and modern—the idiom of the carnival-barker. 

But suppose we were to discover the use of the combined punctuation marks much earlier in the written record that we would have supposed, and being used in more learned circles? Perhaps that might both serve to remove some of the stigma from the formulation and also shed light on the riddle we posed above: namely, which is to be used—"!?" or "?!"—and does it make a difference?

This weekend, it so happens I came across a perhaps surprisingly vintage example of this formulation. 

I was reading James McNeill Whistler's 1890 compendium, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies—a book made up of the esteemed painter's letters, court transcripts, and polemics, in which he reveals a sideline as an able controversialist. It seems that between creating his famous etchings of Venice, portraits of his mother and various contemporaries, and paintings of the Thames, Whistler moonlighted as a provocateur—and one of a type that seems eerily familiar and modern in the internet age. 

Indeed, throughout his letters Whistler engages in what we would now call a species of "trolling." His well-honed technique consists, more or less, in giving his interlocutors enough rope to hang themselves. He first goads them into responding to some offensive squib, and then does not let up until they have said something foolish; then, he falls silent and departs in triumph. As he aptly sums up the fruits of his method in the subtitle of the book: "the serious ones of this earth, carefully exasperated, have been prettily spurred on to unseemliness and indiscretion, while overcome by an undue sense of right."

As the book progresses, we see him tangle with and alienate various erstwhile friends and noteworthy contemporaries, including Oscar Wilde and A.C. Swinburne. But perhaps his most virtuoso performance occurs in the skewering of a now-forgotten but then-popular art critic, P. G. Hamerton. 

Here, Whistler antagonizes the esteemed author by accusing him of "disguising" an anecdote in "inverted commas." Hamerton replies at length, harping more than once on the fact that "inverted commas" are a standard way to offset quotations. Before making this point, however, he—bizarrely—reproduces Whistler's charge word-for-word, but without offsetting it in quotation marks. Then, he proceeds to quote portions of the charge again (which we have just read from his own hand) in the following paragraph, but this time in quotations. 

Finally, Hamerton closes by stating that "it is scarcely necessary" to refer to the real meat of his grievance—namely, that Whistler alluded to him as "a Mr. Hamerton"—which, he goes on to declare (having rhetorically disclaimed any personal interest in the matter), is "a breach of ordinary good manners in speaking of a well-known writer!"

Throughout this performance, one feels a sense of rising anticipation—an excitement mixed with dread. Oh lord, he's being such an ass! we think. What ever is Whistler going to do with this reply? One shudders at the hay Whistler will be able to make of it. Until, suddenly, the excitement crests. One realizes, seemingly in the same moment as the compiler, that no further response is necessary. Nothing could be added to the satire that Hamerton has already unintentionally heaped upon himself. Thus, Whistler concludes with a single marginal comment: "Q.E.D." 

Before his successful entrapment of Hamerton, however, Whistler devotes himself to pitting another member of the same species of game—the fellow art critic Tom Taylor—who, as the book shows, also testified against Whistler in his defamation case against Ruskin that started it all. After the trial concluded—the court having found for Whistler and awarded him a sum total of one farthing in damages—Whistler proceeds to pen a polemical essay decrying the practice of literary men and non-painters opining on artistic mediums (such as painting) in which they have no first-hand experience or ability. 

Taylor, like so many others in the compilation, takes the bait. He writes back in the same journal's pages to fulminate against Whistler's fulminations, stating that it is a good thing for art that artists are not the only ones permitted to pronounce upon the subject, for—he writes—"it will be a bad day for art when the hands that have been trained to the brush lay it aside for the pen."

The only problem with this line of attack is that it is a non sequitur—one that betrays a misreading of the Whistler article to which it was responding. At no point did his interlocutor say that painters ought to take up the mantle of authoring criticism. Whistler does, in the course of his essay, suggest that the only proper art criticism is that performed by artists, but he means that visual art is corrected by the progress of visual art, and that words—belonging to an entirely different medium—can never have much bearing upon it. (Art, he states, has always "written its own comments on canvas.")

After we have perceived Taylor's misstep, we have the same feeling of rising suspense as we experienced above, in witnessing the hunting and spearing of Hamerton. What's Whistler going to say to that one?, we think. But once again, the painter finds that a refutation is simply unnecessary. Taylor has already damned himself irretrievably. Whistler therefore appends only the merest marginal comment, indicated by an asterisk (another of the characters discussed at length in Houston's book). The comment reads simply: "!?"

This is what I mean about Whistler's correspondence seeming to oddly prefigure the internet age. That mute and wordless cry of consternation is exactly the sort of thing one might put into a text message, in response to some particularly strange and irritating utterance from one's interlocutor. "!?" 

And I will note that Whistler's ordering of the two characters accomplishes more than what our now-standard and familiar practice of writing "?!" would do in the same setting. "?!", after all, comes across as a single eruption of disbelief. Something like: Huh?!  Whistler's preferred rendering, meanwhile,—"!?"—manages to convey in the same number of characters a complex succession of responses. It expresses first surprise, and then a need to inquire what could be the source of such an outrageous misconception. Something like: "Oh my god! Are you serious?"

The history of the way grammatical practice has evolved in the internet age has not begun to be written, but I suggest what we find here is that Whistler discovered through the medium of marginal comment something that has subsequently proved very useful to us moderns working in the literary form of the text message and the social media post. It also points to what may be the emerging de facto rule of the use of multiple closing punctuation marks. We said at the beginning that these rules had not yet been formalized, of course; but grammatical rules are only ever descriptive of usage in a particular setting, and thus they can only ever come after such principles have already been laid down unconsciously in practice, and so we are as entitled as any to try to empirically and inductively assess what those might be. 

And I suggest that rule is as follows: when ending a sentence that is grammatically a question, but which we ask with a feeling of consternation, we close with "?!". But when we wish to convey a succession of emotional responses of surprise and disbelief for which words are unnecessary, and we wish the exclamation to stand alone, without a preceding sentence attached, we resort to Whistler's excellent "!?"

This distinction has the advantage both of being logical and of reflecting a meaningful difference between the two uses. Whether my proposed rule catches on, however, will—by my own principles—come down in the end exclusively to whether or not people find it efficacious and time-saving enough to be worth adopting. 

If not, may my rule go the way of the interrobang, and good riddance.