International Sarcasm Symbol

[Jaime_Wolf]

Dear god no.

1) It's like saying "That was a joke, get it, get it?".

2) You should all know by now that sarcasm directed at a wide audience will be misinterpretted by someone. So if you try it in that context, you have no one to blame but yourself.

3) Maybe if sarcasm keeps failing, people will try to develop an actual sense of humour. Sarcasm is almost never creative, funny, or original, it's just saying the opposite of what you mean with different voice inflection. It's funny for a year or two after you discover how to do it, in largely the same way that children get a big kick out of discovering how to say "no" to things. (Any time someone describes themself or their sense of humour as "really sarcastic" like it's a good thing, it's usually worthwhile to put substantial effort into never speaking to them again.)

 

[Asuka Soryu]

Sarcasam on the internet is like a Ninja. By the time you realise it's there, it's already to late.

 

[Gildan Bladeborn]

We really don't need a symbol for conveying sarcasm through text, not when there are so many effective methods for conveying sarcasm via text already. People like to say that sarcasm doesn't work well on the internet, but the truth of the matter is that it's not especially hard to write sarcastic prose that anyone with a modicum of reading comprehension would never dream of taking at face value - the people who complain that sarcasm doesn't translate well to text are the ones who are astoundingly bad at conveying it via text, or those with feeble reading comprehension skills.

The problem arises when people attempt to simply say something sarcastic they might ordinarily say out loud - that will almost never work in plain text, unless you are an exceptionally verbose and clever in your typical speech patterns; text doesn't ordinarily convey tone of voice, so it has to rely on the content itself after all. With formatting tricks though the missing element (tone of voice) can be re-introduced to the otherwise ambiguous and straightforward text: italics, bold print, or what have you, can all be used for ordinary emphasis certainly, but if you stress the emphasis on certain words in a sentence, it's pretty damn obvious you are being sarcastic. I find conveying ridiculous things in an overly earnest and excitable tone also tends to get the message across.

 

[Kuroneko97]

Speaking of sarcasm, in math class a girl was asking how to do a problem in what was called a test, and I yelled out "You put the numbers on the paper." Is that sarcasm?