New Punctuation Mark
Have you ever answered a question hesitantly, only to have some smartass ask, "Was that a question or a statement?" This happened to me the other day, although fortunately I was both the person making the semi-question / statement, and the person asking what the hell I had just said. Being your own critic is a pretty efficient setup.
Well, I decided right then that what the English language needed was a new punctuation mark for just such an occasion. If you see this new punctuation mark at the end of a sentence, you'll know that the preceding sentence was neither a question or a statement. It was both!
You might ask how this works in spoken form. This is where that pesky "question or statement?" question tends to come up. The good news is it's a self-regulating system. Once the existence of the "quatement" punctuation mark becomes common knowledge, people will no longer ask if you just made a statement or asked a question. If they can't tell one way or the other, they'll just assume you made a "quatement". Creating a gray area makes asking whether everything is black or white unnecessary.
A note about the word "quatement" - I made it up as I was writing this article, as the logical combination of the words question and statement. I did a quick Google search for the term, and found 1,510 references to this word in web pages written in English. So maybe I'm not completely original, but I'm not borrowing other peoples' ideas, either. As far as I can tell, however, none of the other pages is suggesting new punctuation.
As far as the design of the new punctuation mark, that's where I've hit a bump. I'm an idea guy, but I'm no graphic designer. My best idea so far is a backwards "S" over a period. Or maybe, since I'm calling this kind of speech a quatement, a lowercase "q" raised up over a period. That way it looks like the thing it's a symbol for, and it looks a little like a backwards question mark combined with an exclamation mark. Anyone else who's good with symbols (except Dan Brown) is welcome to submit an idea. Since there's no standard form on the keyboard for the quatement punctuation mark, I'll just write it "q."
If you want to read about other ill-conceived ideas of mine, you should check out the rest of my blog q.
