Those of you who actually read this blog must realize that I have a deep interest in the English language and its usage. I think of myself as a traditionalist, although Dick Weiss and his ilk might prefer to use the alternative phrase “old fart”. For example, I deplore the hardly-recognizable (for me) letter sequences that have been spawned in the media for social intercourse such as twitter (or is it Twitter?) that limit the number of characters that can be used in a message, thus enforcing brevity in correspondence: lol, btw and wtf spring to mind, but there are many such abominations. It seems that to achieve success in the tweetosphere, one must learn another language; a language that has similarities to Croatian in that there is a paucity of vowels. My reason for interjecting Croatia here (they call it Hrvatska over there) is that some years ago I was driving back to Italy from the beautiful island of Krk (see what I mean?) off the coast of Croatia. My route took me towards Trieste, close to the Slovenia-Italy border. While on the Hrvatskan roads I would read signs with indications to a place called Trst and it took quite a while for me to realize that Trst was Croatian for Trieste, minus its three vowels. One wonders whether “frt” is “fart” in Zagreb, or is it Zgrb?

However I digress, the reason I sat myself down today to write a blog post, was to inform my faithful readership that I had learned a new word. This is the second new word that I have learned in the last six months, the first being “selfie” which had to claw itself all the way from the Australian continent to reach my lexicon. Today’s new word was learned from the NYT’s crossword puzzle; it was the answer to a clue that looked like this “?!” I have used this same conjunction of question and exclamation marks myself in various writings, but I had no idea that it had actually been given a name, and one eleven letters long (nice alliteration there).

So my new word for today is “interrobang”. A little research shows that there have been efforts to introduce a new symbol which looks like a question mark overlaid with an exclamation point, but I was unable to find such a thing in the symbol table in Word, where many weird and wonderful symbols can be found.

O what future wonders await us?!