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Comment by iggldiggl | Hacker News Reader

I don't really like the dedicated interrobang character, because it loses the distinction between ?! and !?, which is probably rather subtle, but to my mind definitively there.

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How would you define "?!" vs "!?" ? I agree they're different. To me the "greater" feeling comes second. "?!" is more surprising, while "!?" is more confusing. With "‽" the feelings are equal.

I agree with you on ‽, but differ with you on the "!?" and "?!" -- for me, the first character is the stronger marker of sentiment.

If I could roughly generalize the sentiment:

Are you just going to stand there and lie through your teeth?!

Have you ever seen such an amazing sunset!?

So you're with joombaga, not willhimsa -- right?

I'd tend towards willhinsa and yes, I'd rather switch the question and exclamation marks around in rplst8's examples.

My thought is that punctuation "terminates" a sentence, and so the mark that's further to the right is "terminated" later, therefore it more represents the overall sentiment. The left punctuation mark is like a modifier; it's an adjective before a noun.

Are you just going to stand there and tell me this isn't the most amazing sunset you've ever seen‽

I think I'd agree with that, too, i.e. the first character being the stronger marker.

I would argue that those two choices remain available to you, and that you can reach even finer levels of subtlety by using (or conspicuously not using) the interrobang.

(Just don't use "??!" because that's a trigraph for "|".)

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