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Wednesday, June 29, 2005

Irony marks: \they will radically transform your life\

Have you ever wished you could write something like "It's high time someone brought a touch of class to this classic children's story, after that horrible, charmless, low-brow, cynical Gene Wilder vehicle so many of us choked down in our youth" without somehow conveying the false impression that you dislike the "vehicle" in question? Sometimes irony can be hard to convey in print, particularly if, \unlike me\, the writer is prone to sincere over-the-top condemnations when not being ironic.

Yes, the humble backslash would be a perfect way to indicate irony (or, as someone recently wrote me, "'irony,' as you call it"). The idea of a new punctuation convention denoting irony is not original--a friend and I took it from an article [LINK] in Slate. Sadly, the mark proposed was tremendously lame, a sort of short inverted exclamation point. Suggesting a pair of backslashes is kind of like telling Ogg that that thing of his with an axle through it should be a round disk instead of a rectangle.

Anyway, please adopt and popularize these irony marks if they suit you. On the general subject of irony, try to figure out why a local family law attorney thought this would be a good way to portray the people helping him get your kids back: "\We're perfectionists\ . . . we can't \afford\ to make mistakes."


posted at 2:25 PM

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