This week, England’s Telegraph UK, featured the SarcMark, a purportedly new innovation for warning others of your not so sincere tone. A life-long ironical satirist myself, the SarcMark seemed to offer the prospect of more directly insulting the oblivious. Unfortunately the SarcMark isn’t a novel idea — at all…
Available for download at the rate of $1.99, the SarcMark itself resembles a backwards letter ‘G’ with a kidney stone. Though I liked the idea at first, something seemed oddly familiar about it — as if I had seen it before.
After combing the internet for a bit, I found paydirt…
I knew my aborted 12-year old Hebrew studies would come in handy some day. Yes, the SarcMark is actually the Hebrew letter ‘Pey’ or ‘P.’ It seems that the industrious folks at Sarcasm Inc. are opening up an entire new market to consumers — we now have the ability to buy and sell the letters of foreign alphabets for profit! That’s literally hundreds of new symbols that can be trademarked and sold on the open market. What an opportunity! (Add desired stolen symbol here)
Inspired by Sarcasm Inc, I wanted to unveil the newest Mep Report grammatical addition to the lexicon. It’s this:
I call it the Super Exclamation Point! Why use a regular old line with a dot, when (for only $4.99 plus shipping and handling) you can have this robust image of a slanted ‘T’ next to a man with a stick up his behind. It’s completely novel and definitely not English! Order now!
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As an aside, it did also occur to me that we already have the equivalent of a SarcMark. It’s this — :P. The tongue-sticking out smiley face (made up of a colon and a P) is intended to convey joking or sarcasm, and is already used at the end of the sentence. Perhaps this is why Sarcasm Inc chose to steal the Hebrew letter ‘P’. They are literally buying out the competition. If they trademark all letter ‘Ps’ for themselves, they will own a majority stock in the world’s tongue-sticking out smiley faces and have outright ownership over all of the methods of declaring written sarcasm. How devious! (insert stolen symbol here)
