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SarcMark Gives Sarcasm Its Own Over-Priced Punctuation Mark

by Terrence O'Brien on January 16, 2010 at 12:12 PM

Sarcasm Gets Its Own Over-Priced Punctuation Mark
It should come as no surprise that at Switched we communicate, not only with each other, but the outside world primarily through electronic means. In fact, last week's CES was the first time most of us have ventured outside of our solitary writing dungeons in months. One of the shortcomings of e-mail and instant messaging is that often our natural snark and sarcasm gets lost in translation to print.

In order to help ease the confusion, a design firm has created the SarcMark, punctuation meant to imply facetiousness. The mark, vaguely reminiscent of the '@' symbol, consists of a dot inside a spiral and is meant to be used like a question mark or exclamation point.

The mark is available as a download for Windows and Mac computers, as well as BlackBerry handsets. Unfortunately, in order to get it, you'll have to fork over $1.99 to a slightly shady looking Web site (we're not saying the company Sarcasm Inc. is a scam, just that the site doesn't look trustworthy).

For our part at Switched, we're going to stick with italics to indicate sarcasm. The SarcMark is totally worth your $1.99. See? Works perfectly. [From: Telegraph]

Tags: font, italics, language, punctuation, sarcasm, SarcMark, symbol, top

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