The Interrobang Report - part 1

IT'S PUNCTUATION, JIM. BUT NOT AS WE KNOW IT.... more

by Jim Williams

Title

The Interrobang Report - part 1

Artist

Jim Williams

Medium

Digital Art - Digital Art And Short Story

Description

IT'S PUNCTUATION, JIM. BUT NOT AS WE KNOW IT.

Howdy, y'all! This is The Right Honorable Rantin N. Raven-Faux VI, President and Dean Emeritus of Gerbilology of the College of Recreation, Anthropology, Archaeology, Computer, and Kinesthesiological Sciences in Myassa, Florida (CRAACKS in Myassa). Pleased to make y'all's acquaintance. There has been much recent turmoil in cities, states, colleges, and universities across our Great Nation. I have recently been informed of a controversy on our own campus and in our home town of Myassa, which I have come to address: the disappearance of our indigenous interrobangs.

The Department of Punctuation in CRAACKS' College of Grammar was tasked with researching the possible reasons for the interrobang's disappearance. Lead Investigator from the Experimental and Educational Punctuation Committee, Emanuella H. Kruiking-Feist, has provided us with the following scholarly report.

Hi everybodyyyy! It's me, your own Myassa Lifestyle Correspondent, Emanuella! So, as some of you may know, the interrobang crisis began during my reporting on the Myassa Redneck Olympics event, The Worm. If you don't know about the Redneck Olympics, please follow my sporadically ongoing reports on Redneck Sports Lifestyle in Myassa. So, I was asked to prepare this report for the Experimental and Educational Punctuation Committee because I was the person who brought up the problem and the only person who gave a rat's rectum. Anyway, they paid me.

THE HISTORIC INTERROBANG
So, the first part of my report provides a short educational narrative of the interrobang's history and contributing factors to its disappearance. The second part describes experimental uses of various punctuations in combination. An example of a Times New Roman interrobang, as interpreted by an artist, is pictured above.

So, many people do not know about the first emoji, the INTERROBANG, or that it expresses both surprise/shock (!) and curiosity/questions/wonder (?) in one punctuation. The name is a PORTMANTEAU combining INTERROGATIVE (?) and BANG (!), an expression used for the EXCLAMATORY in the printing industry. So, they were once considered CRYPTOPUNCTUATION until discovered in the 1960s by typesetters and on some typewriters. Unfortunately, fewer and fewer sightings have been reported since the 1970s and there is concern that it has become an endangered punctuation on the verge of extinction. (eg: Interrobangs are no longer included on computer keyboards, as they once were on typewriters, and they can't be used on any website with standardized fonts. So, bummer.)

So, there are other forces at work as well: the owners of character copyrights. Few are aware that, since Gutenberg invented standardized typefaces, all characters (alphanumeric, non-alphanumeric, wingding, border, punctuation, accent marks, and now computer keys like the DEL key, the PRNT SCRN key and the ANY key) are copyrighted by unique owners. That's right! Copyrights on all the keys/characters on every keyboard belong to separate owners. They claim that it prevents monopolization by one or a very few owners. So, royalties (calculated on a sliding scale using a formula known only to the copyright owners) are unwittingly paid by anyone who uses them for any reason. Computer manufacturers are required to install keystroke counters that inform the copyright owners of the usage rate for each key and character so royalties can be calculated quarterly. So, over half of the price of computers is in these hidden royalty payments. Even font makers must pay royalties for each character they use and how often it is used and for what purposes. So, cats may be pumping untold millions of dollars into the copyright owners' profits.

So, punctuation has the lowest royalties because many people don't use punctuation marks (at least not correctly), especially with the discovery of the emoji. One owner has the rights to the interrogative, another owns the bang and they can't agree on terms to merge the two copyrights. They both want it all to make up for lower royalty income. So, incidentally, emoji copyrights are also held by unique owners. Their royalties are booming. The more popular they become, the more their royalty rates rise. So, this has dropped the bottom out of the interrobang's market.

CONTINUED IN PART 2:
INTERPRETING THE INTERROBANG

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January 2nd, 2016