Feeling sarcastic? Use a SarcMark

By Carly Kuppe
Western Herald

The SarcMark is possibly the newest revolution in the English language since the ampersand as it will soon allow writers to denote sarcasm in e-mails and text messages.

“We wanted to establish an official punctuation mark for sarcasm,” said Paul Sak, SarcMark partner.

According to Sak, the SarcMark symbol is a punctuation mark similar to a question mark or exclamation point.

Sak said the partnership between him and his son, Paul, began when Paul wrote an e-mail to a friend that included a sarcastic phrase, and realized there was no way to designate the sarcastic remark.

“We thought about it and thought there was a need for people to use the [sarcastic] punctuation mark,” Sak said. “In today’s world and in today’s communications, we use sarcasm as kind of a fun thing. Our goal is that it will be accepted as the punctuation mark that denotes sarcasm just like a question mark or an exclamation point.”

Launched two and a half weeks ago, SarcMark has been in the press across the globe.

“We’ve done an article for newspapers in Germany, Russia, China, Bulgaria, and Poland,” Sak said. “The acceptance for the most part has been overwhelmingly in favor of it. It hit the Internet and started to spread.”

But what do students think about it?

“It’s hard to pick out sarcasm in text form,” said Gavin Perko, a film, video, and media studies major. “Sometimes it either comes across as too sarcastic or I don’t pick up on it.”

But for some, the uncertainties of a message can be part of the fun.

“Sarcasm, and more importantly tone, are definitely difficult to interpret via text,” said Carl Bachor Jr., a computer information systems major.

“Identifying a character symbol to sarcasm is a difficult choice. I think the whole idea of being sarcastic is the challenge behind identifying it. Using some type of indicator is a giveaway, and ruins the fun. In face to face conversations people can’t always decipher sarcasm, why should we in text?”

Initially, there were four criteria the partners had for designing the SarcMark symbol — the design should be unique, it should look like a punctuation mark as opposed to a smiley face or an emoticon, the design should have a point in it similar to other punctuation marks, and the symbol should be easy to write.

As for the look of the SarcMark symbol, Sak described it as a backwards ‘6’ with a curly cue in the middle that doesn’t connect and has a point in it.

“Our best description of the look is ‘in the eyes of the beholder,’” Sak said.
To date, SarcMark is available for Windows7, XP, and Vista users, and is supported on some BlackBerry phone models. The next release will be focused on Macs and iPhones.

There is a one-time fee of $1.99 to download the SarcMark symbol at www.sarcmark.com.

“Two generations ago, sarcasm was kind of viewed as something mean -spirited all the time, it wasn’t viewed as a fun thing,” Sak said.

“We like to have fun and we’re having fun with it.”

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Posted by HeraldAdmin on Feb 4 2010. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

Cody Kimball
Web Manager: I'm a Communication Student at WMU, a SCUBA Diver, Boater, Ordained Minister, Notary Public, Web Designer, Film Maker, DJ, and of course a Journalist. Born and raised in Port Huron, MI and a graduate of SC4. http://www.codykimball.com