Irony mark
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The irony mark or irony point (؟) (French: point d’ironie; also called a snark or zing) is a punctuation mark that purports to indicate that a sentence should be understood at a second level. It is illustrated by a small, elevated, backward-facing question mark. Its usage is extremely rare.
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[edit] History
This mark was proposed by the French poet Alcanter de Brahm (alias Marcel Bernhardt) at the end of the 19th century. It was in turn taken by Hervé Bazin in his book Plumons l’Oiseau (1966), in which the author proposes several other innovative punctuation marks, such as the doubt point (
), certitude point (
), acclamation point (
), authority point (
), indignation point (
, essentially ¡), and love point (
or 
). It was also featured in the art periodical Point d’Ironie by Agnes b. in 1997.
Its form is essentially the same as the late medieval 
, a percontation point (punctus percontativus), which was used to mark rhetorical questions[1].
[edit] Examples
- Love may be blind, but lingerie is rather popular؟
- He sold his watch to buy her combs, and she sold her hair to buy him a new watchband؟ (ref.[2])
[edit] Usage
The irony mark has never really been used beyond occasional appearances in artistic or literary publications. There are several possible explanations for the limited use of this punctuation mark:
- Good writing should be able to convey irony through the choice and structure of words alone. In this viewpoint, the irony mark could be seen as a crutch to compensate for the poor writing. Obviously, authors would want to avoid engendering such an opening for criticism.
- In some cases a whole text may be ironic, rather than individual sentences. Then it would either be the case that the irony mark cannot be applied to a single sentence or that it would have to be applied to too many sentences.
- Irony is often intended to be misunderstood by a certain portion of its audience, either to enforce close attention or to create a boundary between those "in the know" and those who miss the point. Explicit use of an irony mark in such a circumstance would defeat the purpose.
- The mark is not currently widely recognized. Hence, its usage could confuse the reader and interrupt the flow of the text.
- The mark is not supported in standard typesetting systems. (In contrast, initial adoption of ¿ required simply the inversion of a piece of existing type.)
- The existence of a number of alternative glyphs or characters that can be used to convey a similar meaning (see following).
[edit] Alternative glyphs or characters
- Marks such as the question mark or the exclamation mark can be used to indicate irony.
-
- In the United Kingdom, television subtitles use an exclamation mark in parentheses to indicate sarcasm: Oh, that's just perfect(!).
- Certain emoticons, such as ;-) , have a typographical value that approximates that of the irony mark, which was indeed the function of many of the first smilies.
[edit] In IT and printing
Although this character has never been officially adopted by typographers, it happens to look the same as the backward question mark (؟) found in Arabic.
Unicode does not include this character, but several others resemble it:
- Arabic Question Mark U+061F (mentioned above, but may cause problems with writing direction when used in Western script)
- Latin letter pharyngeal voiced fricative U+0295
- Modifier letter small reversed glottal stop U+02E4
Commissioned by the CPNB (foundation for the Collective Promotion for the Dutch Book) on the occasion of their Boekenweek, which was about The Praise of Folly, the foundry Underware created a new irony character, and released it into different forms.[3]
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ n3193-medieval-punct
- ^ Literary motif from The Gift of the Magi.
- ^ CPNB (foundation for the Collective Promotion for the Dutch Book), Ironieteken (Dutch)
