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Sarcasm Parsers

Jack Fear

17:27 / 21.12.04

Some genius at Slate has written an article about the need for a punctuation mark to indicate irony.

%%Gosh, why didn't we think of that?%%

Ganesh

17:31 / 21.12.04

Tt.

It'll never catch on. Us passive-aggressive types prefer our sarcasm equivocal.

Jack Fear

17:31 / 21.12.04

I.e., "deniable"?

Ganesh

17:36 / 21.12.04

%Yes.%

Sekhmet

18:01 / 21.12.04

This still weirds me out, because I could have sworn that one of my friends invented the %%% sarcasm marks a couple of years ago. I wonder if he's a closet Barbelite?

Axolotl

18:05 / 21.12.04

I think it might be something that people are coming up with independently as the need arises. %%All we need is a big campaign to make sure everyone picks the Barbelith-Approved form.%%

Aertho

19:29 / 21.12.04

And though I feel sarcasm is best kept as the interpretation of the reader, have any of you clicked the link and examined the use of the "sarcasm" puncuation in bodies of text?

Eeeuuughhh!

It's aesthetically jarring, visually heavy, and looks like footnotes. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

ibis the being

20:22 / 21.12.04

Suppose you're IM'ing that oft-earnest friend you have, and he writes: "I need to go to church tomorrow and confess the jealousy in my heart." You forget—have you ever heard him say nice things about God or do the opposite? "Wait … do you really?" "Sorry. I mean, I need to go to church tomorrow¡ To confess my jealousy¡ And the fact that I just renewed my subscription to Maxim¡" "Oh. Me too. Only as a Jew, I must do these things in synagogue¡"

I can't take writing advice from anyone who could write the above paragraph.

sleazenation

09:42 / 22.12.04

But sarcasm is not an on/off proposition - there are degrees to it...

Ganesh

09:51 / 22.12.04

Well yes, quite. Perhaps there should be a number with the %%s?

Eg. %98%I'm happy Bush is in again%98%

vs %42%You wouldn't catch me believing in God%42%

or %3%I agree with Sleaze%3%

A sort of percentage-smirk.

Loomis

10:00 / 22.12.04

Why can't we use [/sarcasm]? Square brackets don't get used enough these days.

sleazenation

10:02 / 22.12.04

But unfortunately the ability to detect sarcasm and its many subtle shades is based on a number of things not least of which is some level of knowlegde of your Interlocutors, their intelligence and intellectual vigour...

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

10:03 / 22.12.04

And having a system for identifying it takes all the fun (or possibly %fun%) out of those hilarious online misunderstandings...

Matthew Fluxington

11:08 / 22.12.04

On my first web hangout, putting an asterisk after a sarcastic sentence was the polite way to denote insincerity. This was back in the 90s.

grant

03:35 / 23.12.04

I'm still convinced these were invented by a sysop on a local BBS in West Palm Beach in around 1994 or so. I'm really interested in other origin stories or other sarcasm notation, though.

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