Irony mark
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The irony mark or irony point (
) (French: point d’ironie; also called a snark or zing) is a proposed punctuation mark that was suggested to be used to indicate that a sentence should be understood at a second level. It is illustrated by a small, elevated, backward-facing question mark. The irony mark has never been used widely. It appears occasionally in obscure artistic or literary publications.
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[edit] History
This mark ⸮ was proposed by the French poet Alcanter de Brahm (alias Marcel Bernhardt) at the end of the 19th century. It was in turn taken by Hervé Bazin in his book Plumons l’Oiseau (1966), in which the author proposes several other innovative punctuation marks, such as the doubt point (
), certitude point (
), acclamation point (
), authority point (
), indignation point (
), and love point (
). It was also featured in the art periodical Point d’Ironie by Agnes b. in 1997.
Its form is essentially the same as the late medieval 
, a percontation point (punctus percontativus), which was used to mark rhetorical questions[1].
[edit] Printing
This character can be represented using the reversed question mark (⸮) found in Unicode as U+2E2E. It can also be represented by the similar Arabic question mark U+061F, although this is not recommended as its directional properties differ from those of the reversed question mark in that it affects direction of the cursor over the mark, which can cause problems in text processing.
Commissioned by the CPNB (foundation for the Collective Promotion for the Dutch Book) on the occasion of their Boekenweek, which was about The Praise of Folly, the foundry Underware created a new irony character, and released it into different forms.[2]
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ Proposal to add Medievalist and Iranianist punctuation characters to the UCS by Michael Everson, Peter Baker, Marcus Dohnicht, António Emiliano, Odd Einar Haugen, Susana Pedro, David J. Perry, Roozbeh Pournader.
- ^ CPNB (foundation for the Collective Promotion for the Dutch Book), Ironieteken (Dutch)
