Today in 1841, a newspaper publisher from Belgium, Marcellin Jobard, put out an article that included a stylized and reversed question mark and a footnote about that mark, which he called “un point d’ironie.”
The history of punctuation is full of efforts to choose a mark that would make it clear to readers when the writer is being ironic or sarcastic.
And for good reason: if you’ve ever spent any time online, you’ve probably seen how easily people miss the sarcasm in a comment, and that misunderstanding can lead to a whole lot of drama.
Some users have tried to make themselves clearer: emoji can be useful, or some people have tried putting HTML tags with the letter s or the entire word “sarcasm.”
But these can be misleading themselves, or so glaringly obvious that they undermine the actual statement.
Well, print readers have had the same problem spotting sarcasm and irony, and thinkers about the written word have had the same troubles finding a suitable way to point it out to the audience.
In the 1600s, philosopher John Wilkins proposed an “irony mark” that was an upside down exclamation point.
It was a visual cue that the meaning of the sentence was upside down from what the words literally said.
The reverse question mark came around this same time, and both of these symbols became hugely popular right away!
That was sarcasm: neither one caught on at all.
The problem is that irony and sarcasm often rely on subtlety to be effective.
The writer carefully crafts a sentence with a counter-meaning hanging out there for a reader to discover and decode.
Putting a glaring signpost in front of the sentence takes away from that discovery.
Still, people have kept trying: in the 1960s, French writer Hervé Bazin proposed an exclamation point with an U-shaped swish through the middle.
In the 2000s, there was the SarcMark, a sort of swirl with a dot in the middle, and the ironieteken, a Dutch symbol which was sort of like an bent exclamation point, as if it’d been hit by lightning.
This is going to sound awfully negative, but maybe we’ll get to a point where we finally agree to one single irony punctuation mark… just as everybody stops reading stuff.
No irony mark would be big enough to handle that moment.
A couple in Sweden wanted to make their home more eco-friendly while still keeping them warm during the country’s very cold winters.
So they enclosed the whole place inside a greenhouse!
They say if it’s below zero outside, they’re seeing temperatures in the 50s and 60s inside.
Don’t worry, they have vents to let the heat out in the summer.
Can irony really be conveyed with punctuation? (Christian Science Monitor)
Swedish Family Encloses Entire Home in Greenhouse Glass to Create Year-Round Warmth (My Modern Met)
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Image: Alcanter de Brahm, via Wikicommons
