The fifth chapter of my fic is almost ready (currently in beta), and I am facing an issue which I'm sure all people noticed who post stories on fanfiction.net: for reasons I cannot truly understand, the site recently started swallowing all double/triple punctuation marks except for the ellipsis. What this means is that things like "?!", "!?" or "--" get reduced to "?", "!" and "-" respectively.
I contacted the site support in this matter, but not too surprisingly, they did not respond. :/ I have a nasty feeling that this "censorship" stems from some misguided notion of preaching grammatical correctness, but regardless of the reason, the current state of affairs deprives us writers from some very important (if often misused) tools. (Yes, I've tried writing without them in chapter 4. No, it did not work out too well.)
Thus, I had no choice but to search for an alternative. What I found is this:
‽
This, ladies and gentlemen, is the interrobang. hailing from the 1960s. It was supposed to serve the purpose what you'd expect: to replace the "?!" and "!?" forms with a single punctuation mark. It never became widespread, but is nonetheless part of the Unicode character set. I don't think even the great fanfiction.net preprocessor could find fault in it. The problem is: while it is pretty self evident, most people are not familiar with it, and it is also missing from some (supposedly Unicode-compliant) fonts.
So, what do you think? Should I use it? Can you even see the character on your screen to begin with?
Can you see it? Should I use it?
Yes, I can see it fine. I think it could work.
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No, I can't see anything, except maybe a square. Not good.
0(0.0%)
I can see it, but I don't think it's a good idea.
0(0.0%)
I can't see a thing, but don't let that stop you....
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