The Modern Common Sense of Things: Paying $1.99 ensures your sarcasm is lost on no one

by Karen! Garcia | February 4, 2010 | Montana Kaimin

Do your friends often misunderstand your hilarious quips when you’re chatting online? Have you sacrificed including your biting wit in e-mails and letters for fear the printed word just can’t convey the genius second-level meaning you intended?

Fret not, because now by shelling out a mere $1.99 you can own your very own personal SarcMark, a punctuation mark designed to clearly and unmistakably denote your sarcasm.
The software, which was launched a little more than two weeks ago, is compatible with both Mac and Windows programs, as well as BlackBerry phones. The “sarcasm mark” is produced via two keystrokes and is comprised of a lone period surrounded by a spiral.

“Never again be misunderstood!” sarcmark.com promises. “Never again waste a good sarcastic line on someone who doesn’t get it!”

The Michigan-based company Sarcasm Inc., that released the SarcMark, is currently working to patent the symbol, but it’s certainly not the first to engage in the enterprise of generating new punctuation.

The French poet Alcanter de Brahm proposed an irony mark back in the 19th century that consisted of a smaller, almost super-script backwards question mark. He also suggested a doubt point, a certitude point and a love point, to name a few. Needless to say, they didn’t really stick.

And hopefully neither will the SarcMark. (God, I feel stupid just typing it. I can’t imagine how I would feel actually using it.)

In 2008, Vanessa Grigoriadis wrote a story for New York Magazine that detailed our society’s degeneration into snark culture. More than snark, I think our society has become obsessed with its close, perhaps less malevolent, cousin.

Sarcasm is the (intellectually) poor man’s wit. It’s what you employ when you are incapable of being genuinely smart or funny, hence its pervasiveness throughout the history of this unhappy column.

The emergence of this SarcMark (ugh) technology indicates we are either: a) so oblivious or self-absorbed that we can no longer normally recognize sarcasm, or b) such an incurably sarcastic culture that the invention of this symbol was as inevitable and necessary as the question mark. I am inclined to believe it is the latter, if only because I can’t operate for a goddamn second without encountering this virus in some capacity.

And it is a virus. Sarcasmsociety.com even offers a tutorial on “How to be sarcastic,” so you can be easily and seamlessly infected and assimilated, in case you were somehow lagging behind the rest of us.

Not only is the SarcMark completely asinine, it’s unnecessary. You understand sarcasm through context, not tone. Just because you aren’t directly speaking to me doesn’t mean I can’t tell you are being a snide jackass and trying to pass off sarcasm as intellect. Think about it: Have you encountered the awkward, “Wait…are you being sarcastic?” more frequently while chatting online or in person? If someone doesn’t pick up on your brilliant attempt at humor (and this is usually the end sarcasm hopes to achieve), it’s because you set it up poorly, not because you didn’t include the right inflection.

Despite its obvious pointlessness, Doug Sak, founder of Sarcasm Inc., reports in the Telegraph that “After only a week of promoting our SarcMark Software, we are amazed and very pleased by its acceptance in the U.S.”

He adds, “We’ve also received a great deal of interest from software companies and social networking Web sites who would like to incorporate the SarcMark into their applications.”
Well isn’t that just fucking great. (Insert spiral here.)

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