The Interrobang Deserves a Comeback

Amy Shira Teitel
6 min readFeb 13, 2022

I’m a writer, and as such, I love the power of words. I also love the power of punctuation. There’s so much tone, mood, emotion, and subtext that comes from setting your pace, whether drawing attention to a moment by letting it rest or creating urgency with short sentences. Small changes can make subtle but significant differences.

Consider this phrase: “you call that a scarf”

With a question mark, it’s a question, albeit it a kind of strange one.

You call that a scarf?

--

--

Amy Shira Teitel

Historian and author of Fighting for Space (February 2020) from Grand Central Publishing. Also public speaker, TV personality, and YouTuber. [The Vintage Space]