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The Percontation Point
Nov. 7th, 2011 01:42 amI am bringing back the Percontation Point, which looks like ؟ (a backward question mark) and denotes sarcasm or irony in the sentence. With limited character space and lack of tone, I need all the help I can get telling others when I'm being sarcastic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_punctuation
It's kind of amazing how many people got upset at the suggestion of visually labeling online interactions as sarcastic or ironic (I found some message boards while researching the symbol). The most common response is "if you're too stupid to tell I'm not serious, you shouldn't be on the internet".
I'm rather appalled at that attitude. Without tone, and with lots of people reading who don't know the writer personally, I find it incredibly easy to misunderstand irony and sarcasm, and think someone is being serious when they're not.
I went off on someone for being a sexist asshole before he explained he was being sarcastic simply because I had never read that person's name or writing before and had no clue what his personality or viewpoint was. He even used some hashtag code that apparently means "I'm being sarcastic" that I had never heard before and can't remember now.
It would have been nice for both of us if I could tell at a glance that he meant the opposite of what he was saying the way I can tell when I hear or see someone speak.
**EDIT**
I went on a search for a convenient webpage to bookmark that had single character symbols that could be entered into text boxes like Twitter & Facebook status updates, so that I could copy and paste the character, rather than try to remember all the alt codes to do it. I found several good sources, but none of them had the percontation point, even though it is a text character and not an image. So I took the characters from the largest source of special characters, added the percontation point to it, removed the characters that didn't show up or that were duplicates, and uploaded it all as a public Google Doc.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cV6rGtnruVnU5pFwNMEPls318w1c5Pc9chipIHW367M/edit?hl=en_US
It's kind of amazing how many people got upset at the suggestion of visually labeling online interactions as sarcastic or ironic (I found some message boards while researching the symbol). The most common response is "if you're too stupid to tell I'm not serious, you shouldn't be on the internet".
I'm rather appalled at that attitude. Without tone, and with lots of people reading who don't know the writer personally, I find it incredibly easy to misunderstand irony and sarcasm, and think someone is being serious when they're not.
I went off on someone for being a sexist asshole before he explained he was being sarcastic simply because I had never read that person's name or writing before and had no clue what his personality or viewpoint was. He even used some hashtag code that apparently means "I'm being sarcastic" that I had never heard before and can't remember now.
It would have been nice for both of us if I could tell at a glance that he meant the opposite of what he was saying the way I can tell when I hear or see someone speak.
**EDIT**
I went on a search for a convenient webpage to bookmark that had single character symbols that could be entered into text boxes like Twitter & Facebook status updates, so that I could copy and paste the character, rather than try to remember all the alt codes to do it. I found several good sources, but none of them had the percontation point, even though it is a text character and not an image. So I took the characters from the largest source of special characters, added the percontation point to it, removed the characters that didn't show up or that were duplicates, and uploaded it all as a public Google Doc.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cV6rGtnruVnU5pFwNMEPls318w1c5Pc9chipIHW367M/edit?hl=en_US
