The Snark

admin June 13th, 2007

The first known proposal of an irony mark was in the nineteenth century, by french poet Alcanter de Brahm. This looked similar to a reversed question mark. In the 1960s, it was championed by the French novelist, Hervé Bazin. in 1997, the same mark appeared again as the title figure of Agnes B.’s art magazine, Point d’ironie.

Meanwhile, the Internet age arrived. Live text communications are rapidly became the norm, from email to chat programs, to the abbreviated lingo of mobile texting. People today have informal, personal and candid online conversations with others from all parts of the world, and have brought the casual tongues they speak along with them. In an effort to clarify things, sarcasm marks began to be devised, albeit inconsistently.

What a mess! The most eloquent solution was the tilde. Sitting there, dormant since the 1960s, it has lacked a popular or mainstream purpose despite being included on virtually all computer keyboards. Tara Liloia, an early blogger, proposed making sarcasm clearer by ending a sentence with it. The end result was practical for anyone, and not as overwhelming as more complicated solutions becoming popular on forums such as Fark or Slashdot.

Elsewhere, type designer Choz Cunningham was looking closely at the point d’ironie. This distinct punctuation seemed more practical than ever, with the new applications of the written word at the dawn of the twenty-first century. A living irony mark seemed even more useful than one that was pigeonholed into only sarcasm. But this French mark was hard to read at small sizes, and not easy to input to any but the most dedicated. The forums of Typophile.com lead to an amazing discussion of structure, proportions and even a name. The classic irony mark and the sarcasm tilde were merged. Plain and stylized forms were explored. The Snark was born!

Now, the snark has begun to develop a following. It is being developed in typefaces from multiple foundries. It has attracted the attention of scholars, psychologists and writers. And thesnark.org has become the center of the snark’s future.

Learn even more at the following links (will launch in a new window):

The Tilde becomes its own | Paleological Punctuation | Point d’Ironie webmagazine

• Uncategorized