Everyone knows how easy it is for texts and emails to be misunderstood, particularly if we incorporate irony or sarcasm into our comments.
It seems that our attempts at more sophisticated forms of writing are often completely lost on the recipient, unless of course we LOL it.
Now, Michigan based company Sarcasm Inc., have come up with a novel way to avoid all the embarrassment caused by those of us who completely miss the point.
They have created a brand new punctuation mark they’ve dubbed the “SarcMark” which you can download for just $1.99 and which will spell out the irony for us all.
The SarcMark which looks like a spiral with a full stop in the middle will work on any device that is running Windows 7 or Windows XP or Windows Vista or Mac operating systems and on BlackBerry mobile phones.
To use the punctuation mark you simply download it onto your laptop, netbook or mobile phone, press Ctrl and the full stop and it will appear in Word documents, emails, and instant messages and so on.
It is designed to be used in much the same way you would use an exclamation mark or a question mark at the end of a sentence.
“Statements have the period. Questions have the question mark. Exclamations have the exclamation mark. When you see the newest punctuation mark for sarcasm, you’ll know the writer of that sentence doesn’t literally mean what they’re writing; they’re being sarcastic,” the company said.
Not surprisingly somehow, the SarcMark is doing remarkably well.
“After only a week of promoting our SarcMark Software, we are amazed and very pleased by its acceptance in the US” says a report in the Telegraph.
“We cannot give out the exact number of downloads we’ve sold so far, but we can say it’s in the thousands.
“We’ve also received a great deal of interest from software companies and social networking websites who would like to incorporate the SarcMark into their applications.”
It’s not a joke, judging by the initial success of the SarcMark there’s a real need for it out there in the big wide world of words.
However, I can’t help thinking that until folk become familiar with the SarcMark and let’s face it, at the moment many haven’t even heard of it, seeing a strange symbol at the end of a sentence might just add to the general confusion.
Love it!
