Have you ever been so sarcastic, witty and snarky to the point that people think you're stupid? It happens to me a lot. Maybe my humor is too advanced for the rest of society to understand. I'm a big advocate for the snark. It sounds amazingly useful and seems like a necessity.
The snark is a punctuation mark suggested by Henry Denham. It denotes the use of irony and sarcasm. Now then, the use of the snark in novels might not be the greatest idea. I say this because detecting irony in stories is a useful skill and is a main point in literature. However, it is a different story over the internet. I have made fun of people (Oh no! Cyberbullying!!?>!?!!?) over the internet without them knowing. Probably because half the people on the internet are half illiterate. Sometimes I even had to explain my insults to them. However, if the snark was actually used in main stream punctuation, well that'd be really easy then.
There are many other punctuation marks that sound really useful and should be used.
It's a comma combined with a question mark. What else could you ask for? The question comma seems really useful for rhetoric. You could use a series of questions more effectively and it would be more cosmetically pleasing. Isn't underground punctuation the best?
I see your snarks and question commas and raise you my interrobang. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interrobang
ReplyDeleteI do want to raise one point though. If denizens of the internet today can barely comprehend the basic grammatical and spelling rules of English, how do you expect them to adopt a new punctuation mark? They hardly use the period and commas are virtually unheard of.
Just something to mull over. Personally, I see such punctuation marks as interesting things, but really doubt we'll ever see them in the mainstream.