I’ve covered the sustained sarcasm saga here a couple times already, but I thought I would check in again because it seems things have taken a turn for the intellectual. Geoffrey Nunberg is a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. And he’s got an opinion about sarcasm punctuation. To quote him from the article:
“The point of sarcasm is that it speaks with two voices. To the non-initiate, it’s literal, and the initiate hears it as sarcastic, and the whole point is not to tip that balance. [Sarcasm] is an ambient sensibility, you shouldn’t have to mark it.”
Did I mention that he is also the emeritus chair of the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary? So it’s safe to say that he spends more time thinking and talking about language than most people, and that when he has something to say about language, people tend to listen.
What does this portend for the future of sarcasm punctuation? Certainly this is just one person’s opinion, but it is the opinion of a person who knows what he’s talking about. I tend to think that popular opinion will decide this ultimately, and that things like dictionaries evolve to reflect language as most people use it.
