All Hail The Dawn Of The SarcMark
Ever been horribly offended, ruined a cherished friendship or filed for a divorce on the back of a misconstrued joke written in a text message or email? No, me neither. And so SarcMark Inc in America has invented and is now pedalling a punctuation mark designed to denote sarcasm. Do not adjust your contact lenses.
Artist's impression of the SarcMark. Fanx Craig.
This mark is to be used wherever the author believes sarcastic tone needs to be pointed out.
Perhaps I’m failing to take into account America’s stereotypical failure to recognise sarcasm and therefore the value it may have across the pond (no more misunderstandings, divorces, wars even – could the dawn of the SarcMark indicate the advent of world peace? Doubtful), but isn’t part of the fun of written sarcasm the ambiguity itself that lends the statement an edgy, flirty danger?
No, apparently not, at least among those who perceive the use of smiley emoticons as beneath their sophisticated selves. A quick browse for online comments about the SarcMark returns a mixed bag of nuts, with many people declaring it ‘brilliant’ and ‘much-needed’.
It may of course be that a few of these witty wittsters are actually being sarcastic themselves, but their funny funny clever clever joke is lost on us without the use of an actual SarcMark, which if used, would pretty much render the comments unfunny, as no one laughs at a joke that’s pointed out to them, right? Paradox situation.
Anyway, there is also the camp of the fastidious few that have focused on the SarcMark’s aesthetics, drawing attention to the fact it resembles the ‘pe’ sound in the Hebrew alphabet. It would be nice to suspect a Jewish conspiracy here, but enough already! They wouldn’t achieve much by infiltrating all of technology with a voiceless biblical plosive.
Another offering in the highbrow aesthetical debate was this: “Is it just me or does it look like a cat about to lick its arse?” and another offered this brilliant suggestion for further possible additions to the punctuation family: “What I need is a ‘hysterically funny’ mark, for when people don’t realise that I’ve written something hysterically funny.”
And what of the huge division in history we are now facing (or will be in the future but we’ll be, erm, looking back rather than facing)? The point from forth all of written sarcasm was blatantly pointed out. How would new and old texts relate? Are they going to employ someone to go and re-punctuate with the SarcMark where necessary all of literature before this point lest we forget in the future that sarcasm existed before now?
Anyway, the fact that SarcMark is downloadable for $1.99 is enough to irk the moth-walleted. Craig, 30-year-old writer, colleague and friend of yours truly voiced the following observation:
“The decision by the creators of SarcMark to charge for the ability to use it is one that has been met with derision by many.
“One would imagine only a hard-core fan would pay for this. Moreover, if it proved to be even a moderately popular character, it could easily be copied with the use of freeware typeface editors such as FontForge. Once someone has released a copied version (or even a bought version if it is unprotected), anyone who wants it could get it easily and for free.”
In other words, Craig is not a hard-core fan, he gets the things he wants for free on the internet and would not pay for it.
Writer, colleague and friend Kerry, a punc fan in more ways than one (this joke doesn’t work when it’s written down, damn), is all in favour as she positively hates smiley-faced emoticons.
Next I spoke to Andrew Nuttall, genius graphic designer, funny man and delightfully handsome 30-something, oh, and boyfriend of yours truly, who voiced concerns about the nature of punctuation ownership:
“The problem is money. They don’t charge for other punctuation do they? It should be standardised, not just a privilege for the computer-savvy.”
Andrew next pointed out that no one ever knows what the hell the symbol ‘¬’ means, despite it inhabiting the top-left key of all keyboards, and suggested it be replaced by:
which would denote that the author of the words was unsure as to whether he had used the correct spelling or grammar, which is, in Andrew’s opinion, a massive deficit in our existing group of punctuation marks.
Feeling that perhaps we were running away with the idea which would risk pushing a further punctuation mark onto the great unwashed which often fails to grasp the proper use of a comma or semi-colon, I Googled ¬ only to get this response:
Your search – ¬ – did not match any documents
Which means no one has ever used ¬ before on the internet, which suddenly gives huge credibility to Andrew’s concluding sentence: Returning to ¬, this really needs to f**k off my keyboard, if I wanted a scientific keyboard I would have asked for one!”
