Irony punctuation

Written text, in English and other languages, lacks a standard way to mark irony, and several forms of punctuation have been proposed to fill the gap.

[3] In 1668, John Wilkins, in An Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language, proposed using an inverted exclamation mark to punctuate rhetorical questions.

[4] In an article dated 11 October 1841, Marcellin Jobard, a Belgian newspaper publisher, introduced an "irony mark" (French: point d'ironie) in the shape of an oversized arrow head with small stem (rather like an ideogram of a Christmas tree).

[3] Hervé Bazin, in his essay "Plumons l'Oiseau" ("Let's pluck the bird", 1966), used the Greek letter ψ with a dot below for the same purpose ().

[11] In March 2007, the Dutch foundation CPNB (Collectieve Propaganda van het Nederlandse Boek) presented another design of an irony mark, the ironieteken: ().

When read aloud, various techniques are used to convey the sense, such as prepending the addition of "so-called" or a similar word or phrase of disdain, using a sarcastic or mocking tone, or using air quotes, or any combination of the above.

[24] On the Internet, it is common to see alternating uppercase and lowercase lettering to convey a mocking or sarcastic tone, often in the form of memes.

[25][better source needed] Typing in all-capital letters, using a Twitter-style hashtag, #sarcasm, or emoticons like "Rolling eyes" (), ":>", and ":P / , are used by some in instant messaging.

[30] CollegeHumor jokingly proposed new marks called "sarcastisies" which resemble ragged, or zig-zagged parentheses, used to enclose sarcastic remarks.

[31] A "SarcMark" symbol, which resembled an @, but with the spiral reversed and a period at its center instead of an 'a', requiring custom computer font software was proposed in 2010.