Talk:Sarcasm mark

Cleanup
I'd be happy to do some clean-up, I already knew that it needed some help, but I can't seem to figure out exactly what needs to be done, and time is at a premium, since I'm writing my thesis. What can I do to make it look better? I'm open to suggestions. Would changing "External Links" to "References" fix the major problem? It would certainly more accurately describe the purpose for the inclusion of links and it would allow references to Wikipedia articles. TyFrost 04:58, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

My suggestions for clean-up are the following: LW izard @ 06:42, 18 July 2006 (UTC)
 * 1) Make the first sentence less all-over-the-place.  If it's really used in Ethiopic languages, it would be good to have information on that.  Drop the simile.
 * 2) Drop the entire Examples section.  Gaiman and Greenman might be notable, but none of the others are.  Lots of folks have made up sarcasm marks - the examples are not at all helpful, and reek of vanity.  Particularly, drop the reference to Wikipedia.


 * I agree with suggestion 2, but less so with suggestion 1. The comparison to an androgynous pronoun isn't so much a simile, since they're not really such different concepts.  One's a useful linguistic feature that's missing in the English language that's had a number of attempted solutions, but none really took off.  The other is an arguably useful typographical feature that's missing in written English that's apparently had a number of attempted solutions.  Also, I'm tempted to  this article for non-notability.  Is this just a blog thing?   -- Plutor 18:10, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

I suggest disambiguation with irony mark. Irony and sarcasm aren't the same thing of course, but the suggested marks fall into a similar category.Dday76 15:51, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

BTW, this mark is referenced on both pages. Maybe we should put it next to the place on this page that reads: The "(w)iggly exclamation mark," (no example available at this time) Ruff Bark away! 00:03, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

Responses to above talk: I believe that 'External Links' is a convention of Wikipedia, to hold external citations. PErhaps a request for clean up should be posted on the page top?

Irony and sarcasm are sometimes the same thing. The concept of Sarcasm is an aspect of Irony, as are understatements, paradoxes and all intentionally false statements, that are not simply Deceits. So all sarcasm is ironic, but not all irony is sarcastic.

Gaiman and Greenman are notable, indeed, as are other proponents of the sarcasm mark, like H. L. Menken. Nevertheless, I feel it is of value to somehow show that today, many bloggers seek or improvise solutions to the need for a text signifier of sarcasm, as do non-blogging forum users and Instant Messaging users. And, I believe it was in a blogging context that Gaiman was referring.

None of us know if the above glyph is what the "wiggly quotation mark" is supposed to look like. I imagined that to look more like a crinkle-cut french fry, myself. That mark looks rather like some interrogobangs, but is from either the 60's or an earlier French document. --Choz 07:55, 15 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Thanks to everyone who added their work to this article. I'm still confused by what is meant by a request for clean-up and the WikiPedia guidelines have given me little or no clue as to why it is still questionable. If anyone out there knows what is wrong, or if anyone would like to fix the problem, please do, and then please remove the clean-up tag.


 * I am going to remove the neutrality tag, since that problem appears to have been taken care of. If you thik that this still violates POV rules, please read the Wikipedia section on POV again; if you want to argue against the neutrality of an article, you MUST prove bias. This article contains no bias toward any specific camp, group, individual, or view of this, obviously real, concept except for its existence, which is demonstrated by the remaining resources (as well as those removed).


 * Also, can anyone explain why referencing informal resources to give weight to the existence of an informal phenomenon qualifies as original research? I was taught to not to count any research in which the researcher merely presents evidence from various sources as original, and the original form of this page was simply an amalgam of various, albeit informal, resources. In lexicography, if all one does is present usages, without drawing a specific conclusion, it is certainly not considered original research; I fail to understand how articles on punctuation are different. On the other hand, I like the way the article looks better now than I did (except for the number of resources listed).--TyFrost 04:53, 15 November 2006 (UTC)

A new twist on the debate
On typophile.com, I have proposed and invited discussion about a new design and active typographic implementation of an irony mark, and have begun to include it in my own fonts. Being as I suggest this be used to encompass sarcasm as well as other forms of irony (sarcasm is a type of greater group) I thought it would be relevent to mention it here. As I am attempting to inspire other type designers, and draw from thier expertise, this may be of some note. There are further details, as well as a link, on the irony mark's talk page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Irony_mark. --Choz 07:55, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

A suggestion
If the contributor dislikes the clean-up tag, maybe they should do the clean-up themself. It could be better. Why is there no image of the SARCASM MARK, if that is the topic?

Please don't tell me there is a link buried in there somewhere? That tells me there needs to be a cleanup, or some thought, and think why would people look this up? They have seen the mark and want to know what it means, or they have heard of it and want to know what it looks like.

Have at it and I look forward to the update!

--APDEF (talk) 15:37, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

Sarcasm delimiters
There's a link in the "External Links" section that discusses using percent signs as indications of sarcasm. The authors of that external page trace it back to a YahooGroups post in 2003. However, I remember a sysop of a local (South Florida) BBS suggesting using percent marks as "sarcasm delimiters" in 1994 (more or less -- the board only existed between 1993 and 1997, if recollection serves). I've been curious about their origins ever since, and have included them in the wiki-FAQ for the Barbelith.com community. I don't know if they're original to my BBS sysop or not, and they seem like the kind of concept that could easily develop in parallel in many different communities at once.

Has anyone else here run into their use? And if so, should they be made part of this article? --grant 13:56, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

Ethiopic Sarcasm Mark
The statement “…a sarcasm mark exists in the Ethiopic languages…” should include an example of the mark. –Wulf 05:55, 6 February 2007 (UTC)


 * The mark in question is called temherte slaq and it looks like ¡ the inverted exclamation mark used in Spanish. It is referenced in the following document

http://yacob.org/papers/DanielYacob-IUC15.pdf A Roadmap to the Extension of the Ethiopic Writing System Standard Under Unicode and ISO-10646 by Asteraye Tsigie, Berhanu Beyene, Daniel Aberra, Daniel Yacob


 * The passage relating to the temherte slaq reads as follows -


 * Ethiopic Sarcasm Mark —Temherte Slaq

Graphically indistinguishable from U+00A1 (¡) Temherte Slaq differs in semantic use in Ethiopia. Temherte Slaq will come at the end of a sentence (vs at the beginning in Spanish use) and is used to indicate an unreal phrase, often sarcastical in editorial cartoons. Temherte Slaq is also important in children‘s literature and in poetic use. Debate is needed among Ethiopian scholars to determine if inverted exclamation mark is acceptable. Anarchodandyist 21:06, 29 June 2007 (UTC)

Mark of sarcasm #REDIRECT?
Just wondering; wouldn't it be a good idea to make the Mark of sarcasm page redirect here? Or is that not the same thing? bb 13:47, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

air quotes
Should you mention the use of quotes as the standard English usage to show that something is not intended to be literal. It is common enough that it has spread into verbal communication with the use of "air quotes." -Joe Hendrickson

Inappropriate remark?
I don't know much about Wikipedia's policies or anything, but near the end of the "Examples" section of the article, there is a statement that doesn't seem to be quite encyclopedic in nature ("However, most of the time sarcasm is obvious to anybody of reasonable intelligence, so a simple question mark is often used"). Does a statement like that really belong in this article? I would delete it, but I'm familiar enough with Wikipedia to know if that's a good thing to do or not. --70.238.201.208 (talk) 02:24, 25 February 2008 (UTC)


 * Well, perhaps it's badly phrased, but it echoes a valid point. Sarcasm is a form of irony; irony is about hidden meaning.  If you have a typographic mark to indicate it, it's not hidden any more, is it?  Therefore (ironically!) any statement tagged with such a mark becomes neither ironic nor sarcastic...   78.148.105.189 (talk) 13:58, 28 February 2008 (UTC)


 * The point isn't valid at all. Sarcasm isn't meant to be hidden, that's why when it's used in speech it's spoken in a special tone of voice. It only seems hidden when it's written down, making some way of marking it desirable. --86.135.178.19 (talk) 20:49, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

Is this truly noteworthy?
One of the Wikipedia guidelines is that a topic be noteworthy. One of the criteria for this is that it has been cited by others. I note here that the ONLY citation in this article is a request to include the mark in the Unicode version of the Ethiopian script. Yet all the discussion has been about use in English. And this discussion page is much longer than the article itself! Unless somebody adds some real meat to the article itself, I suggest deleting it altogether as not being noteworthy, or possibly incorporating it into some more general article on punctuation.Pete unseth (talk) 19:54, 30 September 2008 (UTC)

Doesn't it strike anybody as odd that the discussion page is so long, and the article itself is so short and undocumented? This page is largely a discussion of ways to mark sarcasm, very little about the ostensible topic of the article itself. If anybody thinks this article should not be deleted, I challenge you to at least cite some documented example of this punctuation mark in real use in a substantive place. Otherwise, I call for deleting this article on the grounds of not being Noteworthy. Pete unseth (talk) 20:42, 29 October 2008 (UTC)
 * I rather strongly question the notability of Temherte Slaq, but I can't be certain, not knowing anything about the Ethiopic language. The notability of other proposed indicators of sarcasm is shaky at best.  I don't feel like this article must be deleted at all costs, but given the dubious notability and poor state of the article, I wouldn't be sad to see it go.  WP:PROD would probably be the next step, if it hasn't been attempted already. -Verdatum (talk) 15:59, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

image
There should really be a picture of the symbol in some prominent, obvious place on the page, similar to the one on the "Irony Mark" page. 71.255.144.214 (talk) 09:25, 31 December 2008 (UTC)