Sarcasm Mark

[jack]

Via MegaMole, http://megamole.livejournal.com/641176.html,
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/6995354/Sarcasm-punctuation-mark-aims-to-put-an-end-to-email-confusion.html, a company proposes a proprietary punctuation mark to indicate sarcasm. It's like the comedy buffet of the decade.

Comments

[corrvin]

Actually, given the percentages involved, and the wear and tear on my keyboard, I'd rather have a mark that indicates I'm NOT being sarcastic.

[jack]

That was my reaction! I often say something deadpan, and someone asks if I mean it, and I say "did you SEE me hold up my "not being sarcastic" sign"?

It might be good to have a clear mark for "factual" and "counterfactual" for when you needed them.

OTOH, a lot of what I write is functional/factual, so is not actually sarcastic.

OTOH, maybe training myself to decide in advance without hedging if I'm being serious and then make it clear verbally would be good practice.

[corrvin]

"It might be good to have a clear mark for 'factual' and 'counterfactual' for when you needed them."

Some fanfic communities use attribute!noun to indicate counterfactual stuff, such as a Harry Potter fanfic with, say, evil!Dumbledore. I'm not sure what the factual version of that would be, though.

The problem with being deadpan is that once someone's got it in their head that you're being sarcastic, no amount of "Really, I do!" is convincing, because it ALL reads as sarcastic.

[simont]

evil!Dumbledore: I've never quite been clear on why such a weird punctuation mark is needed for that job. (Particularly one that's similar in proportions to an alphabetic letter and hence doesn't do a good job of visually separating the words it falls between.) What does it convey that the almost mainstream "evil-Dumbledore" wouldn't?

[corrvin]

(Apologies, I'm at work and only about half my brain is working right now.)

To me, attribute-noun means more "this noun happens to be attribute" and attribute!noun means "this noun has attribute as an essential part of its being."

On the other hand, that may be a personal reading only, and there may be no need for two meanings, or a better way to divide such meanings.

On the gripping hand, using attribute!noun avoids this hyphen issue.

[jack]

no amount of "Really, I do!" is convincing, because it ALL reads as sarcastic.

:) I know what you mean, and I sometimes deliberately get into that :) But in truth, if I say "no, actually I do literally mean: $thing" it generally does come across as honest if very foot-in-mouth, because if I were being sarcastic, there would be more art to it.

[simonf]

Will it look like an empty rectangle to people who don't have the punctuation mark installed? IF so, we could just use unicode's "white medium square" or some similar shape for the same purpose.

[jack]

I think their idea is that people will be sufficiently excited that small groups of them will mutually install the font, and be able to be sarcastic with each other, and it will spread organically from there.

Or, for all I know, mobile phone platforms facilitate sending messages with arbitrary fonts in, I don't know.

I mean, I've been telling everyone I've met about it for three days now. If I hadn't deliberately failed to remember the name of the company, it'd be arguably successful viral marketing :)

[onyxlynx]

The sarcasmene ('70s-'80s) didn't take. (Looked like a tilde ~ surmounted by a dot. Not available as a character in Unicode, apparently [having just spent time looking at characters, quite a few of which have mysterious-to-me functions]. Not all that much used when people knew of it.)

Two bucks, eh?

[liv]

When I saw the way you capitalized the title of this post, I imagined a personality called Sarcasm Mark. Perhaps like a version of Kate who would give you directions in a sarcastic tone instead of a helpful robot secretary voice.