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If I Were King of the Internet, I Would Mandate the Percontation Point⸮
Satire. Irony. Sarcasm. The written word seldom conveys these things well enough to tell them from someone’s making a serious statement or proposal. (This has even been codified and is now known as Poe’s Law.) Distinguishing serious from ironic is a very old problem, and one that was solved in about 1580. It was in that decade that Henry Denham, an English printer, came up with a solution. His idea was to have a new mark of punctuation that would distinguish when someone was not serious. That mark was the percontation point, and it looked like this: ⸮.
Thus, were I the King of the Internet, you would be mandated to use the percontation point⸮ It would probably be the only punctuation available to such publications as The Onion or The Babylon Bee. And maybe some mistakes would no longer be made:
Libs unironically sharing the @TheBabylonBee article about NBA players wearing lace collars is pretty funny pic.twitter.com/YotaShvRdM
— Kyle Mann (@The_Kyle_Mann) September 23, 2020
Are there any interesting marks of punctuation, real or proposed, that you have come across? If you were King (or Queen or Pony Princess, whatever) of the Internet, what rules would you impose?
Published in Group Writing
Also, there are two cats in the picture.
Internet social media users started using text based emoticons from the start. They were deployed on such social media applicationis (before the term, social media was coined) like IRC and Usenet (google it).
I eschewed them from the start. For one thing, most of them were cute. And I hate cute.
I also figure that if you have to explain satire or a quip, that actually takes away from it. It’s also vaguely insulting to the reader who gets the humor.
And why anyone writing for The Onion, who everyone knows from the start when they read it is a satiric publication, has to explain that something is satiric with special characters escapes me.