The Sarcasm Mark

I am known to be a very sarcastic person. Sometimes I'm credited as such more often than is strictly true and off-colour remarks I make in written form can be considered sarcastic or even ironic once in a blue moon when I am in fact being serious and the truth is absurd or hard to swallow.

I have been, for some while now, in search of an adequate punctuation solution to this problem. Surely something so widespread in at least the English speaking world would have some form of punctuation even if it were some outdated and obscure construction from the 15th century? Well apparently not. There has been a recent move towards it. If you think about it the attitude that sarcasm is a lower form of parlance it's not hard to conclude why they wouldn't have started to come up with ideas to show sarcastic intent. As to why now? Well any idiot can sign up for a blogger account and talk about the lack of a sarcasm mark these days.

Some suggestions have emerged through a way to bring sarcasm to the attention of those being mocked. The innovations created in order to create it have been simple solutions to complex problems. Some of them using simple html tags and others using little or entirely unused punctuation in English drawn from other languages such as the inverted exclamation mark.

These solutions however aren't necessarily the most accessible though, and can become quite a chore having to set them up as a shortcut on your keyboard if you wish to type in anything other than html on an English keyboard. An instant message for example would become a chore.

One example though caught my eye. The use of a tilde. You all know what a tilde is but you might not know it by name. Allow me to demonstrate:

~

That is a tilde. It's been suggested that using a tilde after the offending sentence would alert the reader to a hidden meaning and to re-read the sentence again so that the tone of what would be the verbal could be set. I'd love to bring this kind of thing to a popular use so that it can become a new part of our modern language. An example of it's use for the confused can be read as so:

"I think your shirt is well worth the money you paid for it.~"

So there you have it. The sarcasm mark. Other kinds of marks have been proposed long before by a French poet who needed to bend tone around cold words. Try looking at this to see what I mean.

So sorry if that bored you.~