The exclamation comma and the question comma were designed and patented by Leonard Storch, Haagen Ernst Van and Sigmund Silber in 1992 but the idea never caught on and the patent expired in 1995.
The idea was to use the exclamation comma and question comma within a sentence where there is strong feeling or a question but this emotion ends before the sentence does.
Quite a nice idea but it must be difficult introducing a new punctuation mark – it is not one you would use all that often and people need to be able to recognise it when reading and be comfortable using it.
And if that interests you – here are some more!
