the Irony Mark

Apparently the irony mark (point d’ironie) has a slightly more impressive pedigree than I implied in class earlier. It was not, as I had imagined, an outcome of the era of internet enabled, textual communication. Actually, it was first proposed in the nineteenth century by the French poet Alcanter de Brahm (alias Marcel Bernhardt).

A slightly more recent move is also afoot to anoint a 'Snark,' a punctuation mark used at the end of a sentence to denote a double meaning. There's an interesting thread on Typophile concerning the look of this new punctuation.

Also of related interest: the interrobang