Wednesday, January 13, 2010

This Week in Shameless Commerce

Danielle M. wrote to let us know a company has invented the sarcasm mark, and for a mere $1.99, you can let your readers know you're being sarcastic. Wow. That's the greatest idea in the history of the world. Genius. We love it. Sort of in the same way we love that last sip of soda from a warm can.

Here's a link to the news item about it.


To us, it looks like an ear or maybe a grossly malformed navel. What's it look like to you? Do tell. Sarcastically, if you can.

8 comments:

Faith Pray said...

An interrupted button. Or a man with a big nose hanging upside down. A person with no eyes plugging his nose with one hand and saying "Whew! I am so glad I know how to type sarcastically."

Anonymous said...

You know what it totally doesn't look like? An upside down Pacman who took out his upper dentures.

Bob Cumbow said...

It looks to me like two things:
(1) a misuse of intellectual property: I can't tell if that little symbol at the lower right is a ® or a ©, but I don't believe this symbol is capable of either trademark or copyright protection--especially since they are not trying to protect it, they are inviting people to use it.
(2) an exercise in idiocy. Sure, we need a question mark to tell people to read our sentence as a question, and an exclamation mark for emphasis. But this is not a new punctuation mark, it's just another emoticon; and the only reason for a sarcmark (or any emoticon) is that the person using it isn't a good enough writer to make clear in words that he's being funny or sarcastic or angry. If you can't write well enough to do that, no emoticon is going to save you.

Martha Brockenbrough said...

Hi, Faith, Bob and Jody: thanks for the laughs. I agree with all of the above.

Cuppa Jolie said...

You make me smile. (No marks required.)

I think it looks like a little something developing that one might nickname "Hemmie."

Asa Davis said...

It looks like Yang got into a car accident after looking for his lost Yin.

Lori said...

It looks like the downward spiral of humanity.
I want to add that Jonathan Swift didn't need a sarcmark. Am I now to wonder if he actually did want to eat babies?

Jess said...

I think it's fantastic. It looks like the perfect sarcastic eye-roll to me.