From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Tue Sep 06 2005 - 10:39:00 CDT
(Resending because this message failed to appear on the list, although
John Hudson received it and quoted much of it.)
On 05/09/2005 22:18, John Hudson wrote:
> ... The fact that copy editors have some residual understanding that
> an utterance may grammatically be either a question or an exclamation,
> but not both, ...
How short-sighted is this grammatical analysis‽ Many sentences,
especially those beginning with "How" but potentially very many
rhetorical questions, have the surface structure of a question when
their real intent is as an exclamation. As such they are commonly
punctuated with exclamation marks, but some pedants might insist on a
question mark - although they may then be misinterpreted as real
questions. As such it makes a great deal of sense to punctuate them with
both. But I would prefer to see not an interrobang, but two separate
marks, as quite commonly seen in some languages.
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/ -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.344 / Virus Database: 267.10.18/90 - Release Date: 05/09/2005
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue Sep 06 2005 - 12:18:18 CDT