#sarc mark

One of my work mates has been highlighting the existence of the Sarc Mark to me for a few days now, and I just stumbled onto a Telegraph article discussing how the company behind it has sold thousands of Sarc Marcs.

Thousands? Seriously? To me the Sarc mark seems redundant, if you are too stupid to recognise sarcasm then that is your problem and if you feel the need point out the fact that you just used sarcasm then either:

You are doing it wrong.

You are really insecure.

The whole point of sarcasm is that it’s supposed to be witty, off the cuff, and informal. Adding a punctuation symbol to say: “HEY BY THE WAY I DIDN’T MEAN THAT, NUDGE, NUDGE, WINK, WINK” defeats the purpose.

It’s like the people who end every other sentence with “Pun not intended.” Really? it wasn’t intended? I must have just misinterpreted your entire argument… Oh thanks for pointing that out, and for insulting my intelligence.

If I was going to use a symbol to denote sarcasm why the hell would I pay $1.99 for the privilege? It’s not passed into common use, and probably wont ever. and there is already a perfectly good notation for it, isn’t there 😉

Also The Sarc mark seems to be incorporated into documents as an image (I infer this from the page of the company that’s selling it) that’s just lazy! You can combine unicode characters to make almost any symbol so why insert and image?

Someone should release a Creative commons licensed Sarcasm Symbol, make it available for free, and have it be constructible using unicode characters.

Better yet lets ignore this ever happened, because we don’t need a fracking sarcasm indicator!

Having recently had to look up the definition of interrobang (because fallingandlaughing uses the word- but interestingly not the symbol- about once per paragraph), I came across this other gem of punctuation: the irony mark. The irony mark serves to alert the reader that a sentence should be read on more than one level.*

This lovely comes to us from the French (who else?), who got it from the medieval percontation point (punctus percontavius), which was used to mark rhetorical questions.  Although the irony mark hasn't been widely used, historically speaking, I think it has a potential in the age of the internet- especially once people start to use it ironically.