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Irony mark
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The irony mark (؟) (French: point d’ironie) is a punctuation mark that purports to indicate that a sentence should be understood at a second level. It is illustrated by a backward-facing question mark. An irony mark may sometimes be referred to as an irony point, snark, or zing. Its usage is extremely rare.
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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 (
), certainty (
), acclamation (
), authority (
), indignation (
) and love (
) marks. 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-mediæval punctus percontativus, which was used to mark rhetorical questions[1] — i.e. for Latin 'percontation'.
- If love is blind, why is lingerie so popular؟
- I'd give you a taste, but your tongue's in the stew؟
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:
- 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 widely recognised currently. 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).
- Marks such as the question mark or the exclamation mark can be used to indicate irony.
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- Television subtitles (in the UK) 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 smileys.
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)
- 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 an irony character, and released it into different forms.