Sarcasm On the Internet - January 15th, 2010

Sarcasm isn’t exactly lost on the Internet. Smashing Magazine tweeted this pic today, showing the W3C laying a Twitter-sarcasm smackdown — I guess they’re not quite as dry a group of nerds as I thought they were — and it had me laughing. Then I read that a company in Michigan is now trying to sell a sarcasm punctuation mark.

That’s right. Sell. They want $1.99 for it. A punctuation mark that they made up. I’m not kidding you, it’s all right here, as reported by the Telegraph.

Behold, in all its stupidity: The “SarcMark”

Alright, SarkMark, I’ll tell you how I really feel: You’re idiots. Getting past the glaringly obvious fact that there is absolutely no need for a punctuation mark to denote sarcasm, the mark looks like shit. Honestly, it looks like a third-grader drew it, on a napkin, on a park bench. It pains me to think that these people are actually trying to sell this garbage, and it pains me even more that they’re actually attempting to patent the thing.

The reasoning put forth by these geniuses: That people need some way to more concretely convey their sarcasm over the Internet. According to them, we should cater to people who are too stupid to either write sarcastically, or to understand sarcasm when it’s staring them in the face. Their slogan:

Never again be misunderstood! Never again waste a good sarcastic line on someone who doesn’t get it! Sarcasm – Punctuate It – SarcMark [X]

The [X] at the end of the slogan is where their ridiculous looking punctuation mark goes, but since you have to pay them to download it, nobody can see the mark unless they’ve installed it. This makes me happy, since it means the likelihood of ever seeing the horrid thing is slim. Normally I’d cross my fingers and hope that a thing like this fails, hard, but I don’t think these people stand a chance. Check out their hilariously skeezy site here.

Images: RunLevel6, Telegraph.