The FREE Sarcastion Mark

I know some people who are sarcastic. I know a few of them. I might be one of them. But when I use it in writing, I definitely avoid “labeling” it by tossing in an LOL at the end. Perhaps one day I will start a web campaign against LOLs. But that is for another blog entry (or a past one or two or three… nope, just two).

Back to sarcasm.

After graduating from high school, I remember having a discussion with some of my buddies about being sarcastic in emails, which would be our new form of communication (and IMs) as we moved to different cities, different universities. The answer seemed simple enough: a sarcastion mark.

We instituted this new punctuation in our communication, even in our written letters (it was back in 1999 so people still used the mail, shocker).

But eventually, it died away.

I’m not sure why. Perhaps we over used it? Eventually you just realized that an email from Shannon, Sabrina, Lindsey, Erin, Karen or Alison would be spattered with sarcasm. Probably.

Whatever the reason, it came up in conversation with the guys here at work today, labeling your sarcasm in IM conversations. I know there’s been “debates” about it in regards to tagging it in HTML. Yes, geeky, sarcastic debates.

What I didn’t know, until Google informed me today, was that some company back in 2010 attempted to create a sarcasm punctuation mark and SELL it to you to download for $1.99. They called it the SarcMark. Right there was their first mistake. Stupid name. Has ANYBODY even heard of this? Clearly, it has not caught on.

Back to me and MY clever, sarcastic friends. Here in all its glory is OUR Sarcastion Mark. I like our name much better. Sarcastion Mark.

Oh look, it’s already on your keyboard*, you don’t have to download a new font or anything. Begin using it today, for FREE! Wow, how nice are we? Yes, you can thank us for our forward thinking back in the Y2K-scare days. We knew this would be needed by the WORLD one day.

Tell me, do you like our “invention”? Huh? Huh?

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(On a totally unrelated note, I had some fun with the banner of this blog on lunch today. If you haven’t noticed already—I’d bet not—there are several different images that might load up each time you open this blog or a page on it. See if you can get each one to load. And they’re all drawn by little ol’ me. Nice.)

(And one more unrelated note, there’s now a feed of articles as they’re updated on Chef Guapo’s blog just to your right. See it in the right sidebar? Cool.)

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*In case you didn’t notice, that’s the tilde and the exclamation, which are right next to each other up there above your left pinky. Reach for it, reach for it. Shift and got it. Nice work.