
Irony punctuation - tswicegood
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_punctuation
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trafficlight
Where's the fun in sarcasm if you have to point it out?

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hugh3
This is, of course, why it hasn't caught on in the ~400+ years since it was
originally proposed.

Also, many of those who have at some point proposed it may or may not have
been doing so ironically, so at some point it gets pretty confusing.

~~~
ugh
Well, there’s this widely used gem: ‘;-)’

Why did people suddenly adopt a symbol for clearly marking their irony when
before they have not?

My hypothesis is that prior to the mass adoption of mobile phones (SMS) and
the Internet (IM, e-mail, any form of chat and discussion) it was nearly
impossible (well, unpractical) to have informal conversations with someone in
written form. Even letters or postcards are very much unlike e-mail, a lot
more formal, for the most part carefully crafted and lacking the immediacy of
our new forms of written communication. We used speech for all our informal
conversations up until very recently.

Everyone knows how to mark speech as ironic. You can literally wink, change
the tone of your voice or just start grinning after everyone starts looking at
you with disbelief. When authors wanted to use irony in their works they had
the time, space and skills to create a setup which marks something as irony, a
typographic sign would probably have seemed like cheating to them (much like
overuse of the exclamation mark would).

But suddenly there are all these people who are not authors and who write all
the time if they want to have a conversation. Time, space and skills – the
three of those are not readily available when chatting. (And why should they,
why should you suddenly invest more time to conduct your informal conversation
just because it is in written form?)

I think it works quite well, actually, for what it is, compared to its cousin
in spoken informal conversations at least. Sure, it’s not even the same
ballpark as some of the irony you can find in literary masterpieces but hardly
anything we say in everyday conversations ever is.

(For testing my hypothesis I would suggest finding written pre-Internet
conversations – if the is at all possible – and looking for any marks for
irony or tone of voice. Pretty much seems like an impossible thing to check,
if you ask me.)

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jrockway
Sarcasm is most interesting when you don't "wink, change the tone of your
voice or just start grinning". Good sarcasm is detectable as such even without
any change in inflection, which is why there is no need to mark it in writing.

I also disagree that smileys are widely used to mark sarcasm; they mark any
sort of situation where you might smile. Most of the time, this is just some
sort of happy statement, like "now go get some sleep ;)" when someone emails
you at 3 in the morning.

~~~
ugh
I’m not sure you are disagreeing with me. ‘Good’ (using scare quotes here
because I think the fake kind is also a valuable tool) sarcasm is fucking hard
to pull off! That’s why you hardly ever see it. That’s why writers didn’t need
a typographic sign.

And sure, the winking smiley is also used for other things but do you really
want to claim that it’s not widely used for marking irony? If it were easier
to search for ‘;-)’ I would probably be able to quote a few dozen examples
here on HN alone in no time.

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jrockway
_I would probably be able to quote a few dozen examples here on HN alone in no
time._

Maybe those people are just using it wrong ;)

~~~
ugh
See, here’s how I would parse that: _Clearly, there is no way marking sarcasm
with a winking smiley could be considered ‘using it wrong’ because there isn’t
anything like rules for emoticon usage (and if there were that would be
stupid), hence I’m tacitly agreeing with your comment._

Amazing ;-)

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zbanks
Thank god. I thought this was going to be a link to the "SarcMark"
[http://02d9656.netsoljsp.com/SarcMark/modules/user/commonfil...](http://02d9656.netsoljsp.com/SarcMark/modules/user/commonfiles/loadhome.do)

That movement was just really poorly thought out. Yeah, let's choose some
bizarre symbol and charge people to use it on their computers... but only
people who have also paid for the software can also see it. Yeah, real smart
there⸮

I do, however, approve of the irony mark. I mapped pidgin to autoreplace ?/
with it in IMs. That way everyone gets to see my snobbery.

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nevinera
There's an easy way to insert unicode characters just about anywhere, if
you're using Ubuntu at least:

Ctrl-Shift-u, [hex value], enter.

C-S-u 2e2e <enter>: ⸮

~~~
zbanks
Oh, it's possible, but it's easier to use if there's a quick shortcut.

I love how Gnome handles unicode insertion though.

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mikeknoop
I think this is relevant: <http://www.snopes.com/computer/internet/smiley.asp>

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lurkinggrue
I love this⸮

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confuzatron
Ironically, the irony punctuation mark shows up as a square on all browsers
that I try.

(yes I know - that's not actually ironic).

~~~
moobot
It only does this for me on Windows. On Linux, I see the proper glyph.

