Open Sarcasm Fighting Copyrighted Punctuation

pinkushun writes "SarcMark is a copyrighted punctuation mark, that claims 'It's time that sarcasm is treated equally!' Pretty damn cheeky while they're charging for their software, which only inserts their punctuation through a hotkey. Open Sarcasm is destroying SarcMark by advocating a new punctuation mark (not displaying here properly — alt+U0161) as the new open and free sarcasm symbol. Either way, this will be one interesting turnout. With bad unicode support across the web, displaying the characters properly might be an issue. PS Left out sarcastic end sentence as Slashdot doesn't display the U0161 character."

Meta(meta)[m e t a]

[fyngyrz]

Left out sarcastic end sentence as Slashdot doesn't display the U0161 character."

Slashdot is written in Perl, a language that tends to self-obfuscate within minutes of having been written. Consequently, updating the code base for trivial things like correct display of posted text is highly problematic. Also, even if the Perl implementation was written in non-standard (that is, comprehensible) fashion, to quote Rob Malda in a recent letter to me, "Unfortunately there really isn't any engineering time available to make any changes these days"

Re:Pfft.

[Citizen of Earth]

The British already have one. E.g.: Oh, you're so right, I guess I should be more concerned with Bart's safety than covering my own butt(!). And maybe I'm talking like this, because I can't stop(!). HELP ME LISA(!). I HAVE SERIOUS MENTAL PROBLEMS(!).

Re:Next time, try writing

[cduffy]

Well, duh. Writing is not the same as speaking. There are lot of things that are lacking in writing: accents, intonation, gesture, body language, etc. Should we encode them all? Should we write in the International Phonetic Alphabet with notated choreography and stage directions?

.aipe'a It's actually not such a bad idea.

.e'u Lojban contains a syntax for assembling "attitudinals" -- interjections which describe someone's emotional state (with a syntax allowing complex composition -- indicating strength, negation, combining different states, and the like) which can be inserted at any point in a stream of text. .ji'a They're not just written, but spoken as well -- useful for phone conversations or other situations where body language is unavailable.

.je'upe'i Pipe dream or not, I would be thrilled to see their adoption.

Re:Support for the character:

[marcansoft]

Slashdot filters out just about all useful Unicode for no good reason other than laziness. People were abusing control characters, but they were too lazy to make a proper blacklist and instead opted for an almost nonexistent whitelist.

Re:"Slashdot doesn't display the U+0161 character"

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting annon to keep fire away

¥,€,£

What it looks like

[rpresser]

U0161 is Latin Small Letter S With Caron [www.eki.ee]

Re:What it looks like

[gv250]

U0161 is Latin Small Letter S With Caron

While that may be true, TFA says that the open sarcasm mark is U+00A1, an upside-down exclamation point, to be used at the end of a sentence.

Graphically indistinguishable from U+00A1 () Temherte Slaqî differs in semantic use in Ethiopia. Temherte Slaqî will come at the end of a sentence (vs at the beginning in Spanish use) and is used to indicate an unreal phrase, often sarcastical in editorial cartoons. Temherte Slaqî is also important in children’s literature and in poetic use.

Re:Next time, try writing

[srobert]

"It is like a laugh track or a drum rimshot to indicate a joke's punchline. It only accompanies the worst forms of humor."

To the contrary sometimes the laugh track is thrown in because the humor is considered too sophisticated for the audience. (Gilligan's genius was too cutting edge for us.)