Bier de Stone (blanketsin.com) wrote,
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Snark: typographical symbol used as inflective punctuation

It was 2006 and a few blog entries on the topic of special characters, namely the irony mark, gained popularity in various typography forums. Where was I?

Once in a great while I find a topic of interest worth researching online. There's nothing worse than having a DSL connection with nothing to google about.

No, really؟

That last sentence was used to convey a response of sarcasm. The punctuation mark at the end of the sentence should have appeared on your computer monitor as a mirrored reflection of a question mark. These days, with so many browsers and OS versions, it's hard to tell. But what bout the people still stuck using manual typewriters for their writing preferences?

Just as people still have options to snail mail their letters, there should still be some practical application respectful of vintage writing machines.~

The solution would be using a tilde mark immediately after the period (like the previous sentence), but there is a preference of having the tilde mark hover over the period like a fermata. While computers welcome all the special characters you can think of, writing a screenplay on a manual typewriter is another story, and this little blog entry of mine "in 2010" serves as the perfect excuse for not writing a few pages to my screenplay today. Most of the info I found online today was a maze of satisfaction.

Is it truly possible that script writers have been adopting the new found grammatical punctuation mark in their scripts? What comes to mind is The big bang theory sitcom. If I got anything out of that show, it's that it appears to contain sarcastic dialog whenever Sheldon speaks. So, I set out to search online for a sample script to find out how the writer deals with sarcasm in his script. Since this is a fairly new sitcom, and the suggestive online definitions of the irony mark for grammatical purposes was acknowledged before the sitcom became a prime time show, digging up an authentic sample here might prove to be fulfilling. I was wrong. I found no occurances of the iron mark, or a sarcasm mark. That probably just goes to show you how long the process takes from printed script to televised show. Conclusion: the script I found is dated.

Below are random addresses I found in the 2006 forum discussion about implementing a symbol into unicode like this sample

؟ The mneumonic way of looking at this is slightly humorous in a raunchy sorta way. The hexadecimal is ؟ and can be memorized as "sex with ex(gf) if (and only if) it involves semicolon. Heh."
  • http://www.exclamachine.com/snark
  • http://jasonkaleko.com/BBTtroglodyte.pdf
  • http://blogs.msdn.com/b/fontblog/archive/2005/12/22/506936.aspx
  • http://blogs.msdn.com/b/fontblog/archive/2006/01/04/509299.aspx
  • http://www.liloia.com/archives/000211.php
  • http://linusfurious.blogspot.com/2006/04/punctuational-proposal.html
  • http://thesnark.org/




reference courtesy of Katie's brain

Posted via LiveJournal app for iPhone.

Tags: typography, via ljapp, web research, writing
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