Tyler Cowen of the blog Marginal Revolution responded to an interesting question by a reader. It was:
If you could create a punctuation mark, what would its function be and what would it look like?
Cowen responded:
I've always liked the chess marks "!?" and "?!" and wondered why they weren't used in standard English. The former refers to a startling move which is uncertain in merit and the latter refers to a dubious move which creates difficult to handle complications.
How would you respond?
Link | Image by flickr user Horia Varlan, used under Creative Commons license
If you could create a punctuation mark, what would its function be and what would it look like?
Cowen responded:
I've always liked the chess marks "!?" and "?!" and wondered why they weren't used in standard English. The former refers to a startling move which is uncertain in merit and the latter refers to a dubious move which creates difficult to handle complications.
How would you respond?
Link | Image by flickr user Horia Varlan, used under Creative Commons license
And "!?" as an early form of "WTF"
I would retain my 'day job' so as to stave off 'starvation.'
As for what punctuation mark I would make, I have two:
A backward S with a bold dot within the upper curve. It would be used for sarcastic comments.
Essentially a question mark with the vertical portion replaced with a small circle. This is a mark I learned from a friend that I took to, it denotes that the question or statement needs to be further researched to verify if it is right or not. It is not particularly handy in general use, but in note taking, it can be a handy way to say, "I need to get more data on this later."