Sarcasm mark: what a great idea

Sarcasm, Inc. is promoting a new type of punctuation, the sarcasm mark, which they are dubbing the SarcMark (that CamelCase is so hot right now).  For $1.99 you can purchase software which enables you to use the SarcMark on your computer.  The company maintains that sarcasm is nuanced, even in spoken conversation, and is an even more difficult thing to communicate in writing.  I would definitely agree with this.

I searched their site and couldn’t find any information on what inspired the design for the SarcMark.  To me it looks like an exclamation mark or maybe a question mark was rotated very quickly around the dot.  Is the company implying that sarcasm is a warped form of an exclamation or something like that?  If so, or if there is some real thought behind the design of the mark, there should be a whole section on their website dedicated to the history of the SarcMark, it would add credibility to what they are trying to do.

Especially considering history’s past experiences with sarcasm and punctuation.  In some writing and subtitles (especially closed captioning), sarcasm is represented as an exclamation mark enclosed in parentheses at the end of a sentence, e.g., (!).  At the end of the 19th century, the French poet Alcanter de Brahm proposed the irony mark, which is essentially a backwards or mirrored question mark.  De Brahms’s intention was for the mark to indicate that the sentence should be read on a second level, such as irony or sarcasm.

I’m willing to bet that few among us routinely use, or have even heard of, the parenthetical exclamation mark as a means of conveying sarcasm.  Even fewer still are probably familiar with the backwards question mark.  But is the new SarcMark better than these old ideas?  (It seems the backwards question mark was used in the 16th century for rhetorical questions as well.  That might be something I could get behind.)  At least the old ideas are based heavily on currently used and recognizable punctuation.  You might not be able to tell what a backwards question mark is supposed to mean the first time you come across it, but I do think it’s probably more clear than seeing the SarcMark for the first time.

Now, I’m all for new punctuation, but if you are going to fly in the face of over a hundred years of punctuation, you had better have a good reason.  And I can’t see that reasoning or explanation from the SarcMark website.