I have often been bothered by the fact that there is no
reliable way to indicate
sarcasm in written
English. In
online forums I have seen people use <sarcasm> </sarcasm>, which is admittedly very accessible. But somehow lacks the subtlety which makes sarcasm so fun.
I propose that we create a
punctuation mark to indicate sarcasm, something like the
exclamation mark or
question mark which have the ability to express
emotion in a
character. Of course, I doubt that I could convince people to update all their
keyboards, the
ASCII code and their
fonts, so I think that we need to use a character already there.
I great choice I think would be the under-utilized "|", also known as the
pipe. One could say, for example, |Bill Gates just wants to make good software|, and all the subtle layers of intended irony would just leap into view.
It would also give a new meaning to "ls -a | more". I'm not sure what meaning, but it would be new.