The Interrobang Is The Punctuation (and the lifestyle) You Need

It’s been years, now, since a good friend and colleague characterized most of the things that we think of problems as really just caused by comfortable white people refusing to talk to each other. (Since then, to be fair, a lot of the issues that he was concerned about: race and class aggression, mostly, have crested through the public umwelt.)

This was never as clear as a month or two ago, when I had the opportunity to participate on a panel to discuss land management policy in the west. The event was billed as a round table conversation, with time at the end for questions and answers. Instead we were treated to ninety minutes of glassy-eyed gray hairs reading from prepared statements and retreating to their seats to scoff and stew. Conversation? Discussion? Hardly.

It’s just that we’re always yelling, really. We’re always so certain. And if we were honest I think that we might find that we are not even necessarily 100% certain of our own convictions, and that ignores whether those convictions are logical, or just, or based in any kind of fact. And so what if when we yell at each other, we could simply leave room for the shadow of a doubt. For a runnel of humility that might grow into a trickle of understanding, or a loop of wool that could unravel a shaky premise.

Enter, the interrobang:

It has it all, really. It is at once an exclamation point and a question mark. It says, “I am enthusiastic, but unsure.” And doesn’t enthusiastic but unsure really sum up so much of what we take for granted? It allows you to feel a way and not be sure exactly why. It leaves space amid opposites where conversation can take root.

Even in its etymology, combining Latin roots and base, boorish, fun onomatopoeia into a single word signifies to our best and worst that someplace in the middle is something like what’s right.

So heck, give it a try. Next time you’ve got a letter to the editor about Kids These Days or how Baby Boomers Ruined Everything, throw an interrobang in there. And when you’re using your anonymous Facebook to spew vitriol into the universe, maybe incorporate just a breath of reason. You may need to experiment with a few different hot keys or get at Zuckerberg on Twitter to get the character supported, but if we all work on it together we might be surprised at what we can achieve.