I was looking up obscure punctuation marks for fun -- yes, I know it's odd -- and came across this brilliant old punctuation mark called the percontation mark! It's also called a snark or irony mark.
Wikipedia describes it thusly:
This percontation point ( 
), later also referred to as a rhetorical question mark, was invented by Henry Denham in the 1580s and was used at the end of a question which does not require an answer--a rhetorical question. Its use died out in the 17th century. It was the reverse of an ordinary question mark, so that instead of the main opening pointing back into the sentence, it opened away from it.[4] This character can be represented using the reversed question mark () found in Unicode as U+2E2E.
I can think of loads of convenient times I might use the Snark in written communication! We use it endlessly in everyday verbal communication:
Say, you're in the break room and somebody that you barely know in your office walks in. You say, obligatorily, "Hi - how's it going ؟ "
Or you ask someone to hand you a magazine that is right in front of them. They say, "What?" And you say, "Are you deaf ؟ "
Perhaps your significant other asks, "Do these pants make me look fat ؟ " We
all know that's a rhetorical question!
The percontation point expresses these sentiments perfectly!
I've learned that the code for this punctuation in HTML is
؟ -- now if only there was a keyboard stroke for this!!!
