A Michigan company has finally gotten around to inventing a punctuation mark to indicate sarcasm. Which would probably come in handy if I believed in using emoticons. Which I don’t.
I would say something snippy and snarky about the SarcMark, so coined by the quite literally named Sarcasm, Inc. But it seems that I don’t need to — Tom Metzer, a reporter at The Guardian, has taken care of that:
The real breakthrough of Sarcasm, Inc. is the realisation that, despite having used sarcasm and irony in the written word for hundreds of years, humans are simply too stupid to consistently recognise when someone has said the opposite of what they mean.
So, is the SarcMark a victory for stupidity?
[...] Garner takes on the task of trying to figure out why some mash-ups take — smog — and some don’t — galumph. It’s some sort of intersection between utility and slang, he seems to suggest, with the latter less fixed. So, a decade or two in the future, will we be tweeting or punctuating our messages with emoticons? [...]