What if the idea of an Irony_mark had entered the English language? How would this effect the evolution of the English language?
An "irony mark" in english punctuation?
- Thread starter ArKhan
- Start date
I'm going to go out on a limb and call it ASB 
Many of the best users of irony believe that producing and understanding ironic remarks is a privilege, not a right. Some kind of secret code, also, a brand of trust between two people that allows them to exchange outrageous remarks without offense, because they are "in the joke", while others are shocked.
Hence, good users of irony would try to abstain from using an obvious indication as to the ironic nature of their statements. It would ruin the joke.
Many of the best users of irony believe that producing and understanding ironic remarks is a privilege, not a right. Some kind of secret code, also, a brand of trust between two people that allows them to exchange outrageous remarks without offense, because they are "in the joke", while others are shocked.
Hence, good users of irony would try to abstain from using an obvious indication as to the ironic nature of their statements. It would ruin the joke.
That still may be in our future. It may look like
or something but it's definately something already starting to catch on among people talking online.Such a development would necessitate massive dependence upon written correspondence for communication, in a situation where sarcasm (which is what you're all trying to say) is appropriate. Sarcasm is, after all, an intentional disconnect between tone and content, and until recently, if you were writing a message to somebody, you probably weren't being sarcastic; thus, the difficulty of conveying sarcasm through text has only become apparent by the rise of the internet.
You'd have to delay the telephone somehow, so that the telegraph is dominant for a long time. That might cause a sarcasm mark to evolve, but I doubt it would catch on since the telephone just isn't that much of a leap to make from the telegraph.
You'd have to delay the telephone somehow, so that the telegraph is dominant for a long time. That might cause a sarcasm mark to evolve, but I doubt it would catch on since the telephone just isn't that much of a leap to make from the telegraph.
Good post. Personally I wouldn't be surprised if such a mark popped up in the near future. We already have
. There's a reason smilies are ubiquitous on the internet and were invented soon after people started using it to talk to each other. Tone of voice and facial expression are big parts of face-to-face communication, and it all gets lost in writing. So we have to make up work-arounds to re-add the missing information.
That still may be in our future. It may look like
I tend to agree. The rise of realtime text based communication clearly will have an impact on the language, and things like extra punctuation that clarifies intent when deep context is lacking seem pretty likely.
This is true, but I'd rather take the time to explain the mistake afterwards in those cases than use punctuation as some sort of misunderstanding precaution. In all cases where the intent of the sentence would be clear otherwise, explicitly stating it through punctuation will only dampen the effect. It'd be a bit like saying "just kidding" after every joke.
The interrobang on the other hand, there's a punctuation mark that has my full support.
One of which is made infinitely more likely when you are communicating real time with text, a medium that was realistically never used, let alone intended for, until the last few decades.