I can be sarcastic as all hell. I was raised that way, so in saying this, I’m not really taking credit for it; it’s more like relaying a fact. In conversation with me, it’s fairly simple to pick out. In my delivery, there’s some kind of accompanying smirk or semi-eye-roll or even air quotes on occasion, to let you know that what I’m saying is not how it should be interpreted (sarcasm). It may even mean the exact opposite of what I’m actually saying (irony). I’m a huge fan of hyperbole or exaggeration, and I also love to occasionally throw in its frenemy, the understatement.
In written communication, it’s a bit more difficult to convey sarcasm. Sadly, I think the days of letters are mostly gone, so we’re talking more about email, instant message, texting, social media and smoke signals. Kidding, I meant Morse code. No, actually I didn’t. I’ve found that while composing emails at work, I’ve gotten stuck wondering if a co-worker would “get” my humor and often just deleted a sentence and re-wrote it to make it more straightforward.
These days we probably text just as much, or even more, than we actually have face-to-face conversations with people. If we know the person at the other end of the message, they likely can “hear” our voice and tone, and know us well enough to catch the gist when we’re being sarcastic or ironic. If we’re a bit less familiar with the person, or if we’re just not wanting there to be any question of confusion, then we’ll likely throw in a <wink> emoji or a <tongue-out> emoji to indicate we’re kidding. Some prefer the old go-to “LOL,” or, if shit is real serious, “ROFL” or “LMAO.” See, I think I did it right there? When I just said “serious,” I meant it ironically. Obviously, if a conversation were serious (e.g., my dog died), no one in their right mind would respond with a smirk emoji or LMAO. What I meant there is more like, if a text exchange were seriously funny, then you’d use emojis or acronyms to convey humor, playfulness, light-heartedness, etc.
So this all begs the question, what if there were some way to indicate sarcasm in written text? What if it had its own distinctive character? You’d be reading like normal and all the sudden you’d come across some type of punctuation or marking to make you pause and consider the author’s tone. It’d be like a road sign or waving flag saying, “Hey, I’m being sarcastic or ironic here.”
Turns out, this has been a hotly debated topic in the world of type designers for hundreds of years? Whaaaaaat? Pretty neat, right? I mean, why stop at the question mark or quotation mark when you can forge ahead into something as critical as irony? Since we’re considering something virtually nonexistent today, what would one even call such a character or a mark if one were to employ it?
Great question, I’m glad you asked. We’ve been down this road, and the markings have had a variety of “official” names throughout history. Ready?
Point d’ironie (because the French…)
Percontation point
Tilde
Sarcasm point
Snark
Ironieteken (because even the Germans are snarky, I guess?)
SarcMark
At first read-through, which is your favorite?
I think I have to go with the SarcMark. And a very close runner up is definitely the Snark, because why use two syllables when you can use one? If I had to be a bit more sophisticated about it, I’d cast my vote for the Point d’ironie … while taking a long drag on my thin cigarette and inwardly rolling my eyes. C’est la vie.
My next read-through of the list had me wondering what “percontation” means and desperately trying to reach some Latin (or Spanish, Italian or French) derivative in my head to get to at least a guess. “Contation” looks like it may come from contare, Italian to tell or recount. OK, like I have to tell you something about this text, maybe? And the “per”? Shoot, I don’t know, some kind of prefix that means “for” or “by” or… yeah, I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel. Google!
Well, check this out. From a site called ThoughtCo., “The percontation mark (also known as the punctus percontativus or percontation point) is a late-medieval mark of punctuation (؟) used to signal the close of a rhetorical question.”
Wait, so we’re talking medieval times? Cool. And we’re talking rhetorical questions, coming from the word rhetoric (the art of effective or persuasive speaking or writing, especially the use of figures of speech and other compositional techniques). This kind of makes sense given the plethora of oral discourses and the art of apologetics, dating all the way back to the ancient Greeks.
"When punctuation was first invented by Aristophanes, librarian at Alexandria in the 4th century BC, he suggested that readers could use middle (·), low (.), and high points (˙) to punctuate writing according to the rules of rhetoric. Despite this, it took another two millennia before the eponymous rhetorical question got its own mark of punctuation [—the percontation mark].”
I have to chuckle a bit when I hear the phrase rhetorical question because it brings me back to middle school history or English class when our 12-year-old minds quickly learned the difference between an actual question from the teacher posed to us students requiring an answer, versus the rhetorical question that was more of a teaching tool to guide our puny brains on the teacher’s thought-path. And there was always that one kid who answered the dreaded rhetorical question out loud. Then the teacher would have to stop and say, “Johnny, that was a rhetorical question. . . ,” the sub-text being ‘shut up, you idiot.’ And then the rest of the class would laugh at Johnny, and the shame is still seared in his memory.
My middle school aside aside, this percontation mark’s form was a backwards question mark. I also find this slightly amusing. The rhetorical question as an ass-backwards question… or, bass-ackwards, if you prefer. It was purportedly found in Psalms of David, Shakespeare’s folios, and writings through the 17th century.
If we go back to the ThoughtCo article, the very next part says, “Worried that his readers would not catch such a subtle figure of speech, in the late sixteenth century the English printer Henry Denham created the percontation mark—a reversed question mark—to address the problem. . .”
The thinking is that the percontation mark was much more pervasive in transcribed texts (hand-written), as opposed to typeset text (printed), because it was expensive to get brand new type, so it eventually fell away.
Reading through this teeny part of the debate around the concept of punctuating sarcasm or irony in written text, I was on board. I mean… why not? Then I read this snippet from a sentence in the Copyeditor’s Handbook and it made me pause: “… several differently styled signs have been suggested as aids for readers too obtuse to detect subtle forms of humor without a typographic cue.”
Too obtuse? Shoot, that’s harsh. But suddenly, I felt very conflicted about the whole debate and which side I ultimately fall on. Part of the charm and joy and excitement of embedding sarcasm or irony in writing is waiting for the reader to discover it, uncover it, maybe read it twice and then appreciate it, smile, and maybe laugh. It’s an Easter egg hunt and the goofballs are rewarded. The typographic cue would take away all the mystery and fun. Don’t you think?
If this isn’t making sense to you, let me try to put it another way. (It’s not going to be a perfect analogy, so don’t think too hard). You’re going to a comedy show. As always, the comedian mixes a bit of her personal life, political views and past experiences into her set. You get a bit of serious and maybe even sad mixed up with the humor. Well, what if that comedian felt the need to gesture a certain way every single time she wanted a laugh from the audience? I think it’d get quickly overdone and not be very funny. Someone ordering you to laugh at appointed times makes the whole experience more forced and less organic, and I’ll argue, less delightful.
One of my favorite movies, as you may have seen in a recent Friday Faves post on best movie scenes, is “Little Miss Sunshine.” I think it’s freaking hilarious. But, I know that not everyone finds it funny. I know this because I’ve watched it with people who were either only slightly amused, trying to humor me, or just not into it. And that’s perfectly fine. Truly. We all have our own weird sense of humor and I love that about us as humans. The laugh track in old TV shows was fine and good, or you just learned to tune it out, but I don’t want a laugh track in my book or my comedy show.
To wrap this up, I like the idea of a typographical cue for sarcasm because I adore sarcasm and want everyone to adore it with me, but, I also don’t want to prescribe it or assert humor onto people. That’s not how that works. Humor is shared, true, and that’s what makes it great. But, it’s also high-individualized, and I think that also makes it great. Thoughts? Share yours below.