Gretchen McCulloch’s previous linguistics columns for The Toast can be found here. They are all perfect.
Sarcasm. It’s an Essential Part of a Healthy Breakfast™, but it’s also “dangerous”, especially in writing. What if ~no one~ gets that u are being sarcastic.
this is literally the most srs bsns question ever.
Right, okay, that’s probably enough of the sarcasm voice. The point is, we can speak sarcastically by rolling our eyes or using a particular tone of voice, but what about writing? Why don’t we have a sarcastic equivalent of a question mark or an exclamation mark?
Turns out, it’s not for lack of trying.
There’s a venerable history of proposals for irony punctuation. The backwards question mark ⸮ is probably the most popular: it was first proposed in the 1500s as the percontation point, and was subsequently re-proposed by several people in the 1800s as the slightly catchier irony mark. The 1800s also saw a proposed “oversize arrow head with small stem”, the 1600s saw a proposal for an upside-down exclamation mark ¡, and the 1900s saw the Greek letter psi with a dot underneath (approximately Ψ̣ if my fonts would line up better). And it hasn’t stopped: in the 2000s, we’ve already gotten proposals for both a lightning-bolt exclamation mark and a (proprietary) round-swirly symbol with a dot in the middle, the Sarc Mark. (You can read all about them in detail on the glorious Irony Punctuation Wikipedia article.)
Irony mark as designed by Alcanter de Brahm in a French encyclopedia from 1905
But while these geniuses were coming up with fanciful additions to the keyboard, regular citizens were taking matters into their own, air-quoting hands. We’ve ended up with a whole lot of them, and for the most part they’ve been spontaneously invented by residents of the internet. Let’s take a look — and then we’ll get back to why these methods succeeded where centuries of proposed irony punctuation had failed.
*
Punctuation
The punctuation-mark-inventors may have been heading in the right general direction (#bless) but it turns out it’s clumsy to create an additional character — and you often want to put that ironic emphasis on a particular word or phrase. Enter sarcastic “quotation marks,” tildes (~so effective), and the elaborate variations which a colleague of mine refers to as ~*~sparkly unicorn punctuation~*~. True, it’s sometimes used for excitement or quoting song lyrics, but when I saw a friend reblog a tumblr post with the tag ~*misandry*~, I knew she was ironically distancing herself from the topic in true Toastean fashion.
But we also sometimes do the opposite: lack of punctuation, especially a question minus its question mark accompanied by all-lowercase, often conveys disingenuous deadpan snark, a sort of “I already know the answer to this question but I’m just going to say it anyway. I might be hoping you’ll laugh, but I’m definitely not asking you for it.” Here’s an example:
BARTENDER: okay man, here’s your appletini MAN: [upset] this isn’t what i ordered BARTENDER: i’m sorry? MAN: why isn’t it a tiny apple
— chriiieees (@cwhudson) April 29, 2015
Capitalization
Minimalist capitalization, often combined with minimal punctuation, is also a tremendously productive source of sarcasm. If standardly-capitalized and punctuated text is a regular newsreader voice and all-caps and/or repeated punctuation is SHOUTING!!!! or ENTHUSIASM???, then no-caps with no or little punctuation invokes a flat, laconic tone of voice that fits naturally with sarcasm.
boys like “i prefer less makeup” ok so wear less makeup, tf does that have to do with me — Babygirl (@lilkittten) April 13, 2015
That said, the inverse also works: Capitalizing Unimportant Words imposes a certain sense of ironic detachment. Adding (TM) or periods between each word is optional but extra effective. All-caps, however, is generally not sarcastic: there seems to be a contradiction between STRONG FEELING and the appropriate degree of ironic detachment.
Spelling
Deliberately misspelling words is a sarcasm method that’s especially useful for mocking the argumentation of people who you strongly disagree with. For example this parody anti-feminism twitter account carefully misspells “feminism” a different way in every single tweet — the implication being that women who are anti-feminist are so ill-informed that they can’t even spell the thing they’re arguing against.
I don’t need fimimmim only men know about cars! this morning i confused my cat’s purring with an engine and tried to drive her to work
— WomanAgainstFeminism (@NoToFeminism) April 29, 2015
Birds Right Activist on twitter says-without-saying by deliberately using a combination of misspellings, wrong parts of speech, and omitted words.
Dear environmentists: maybe I not “green” but I am red which is compliment color hello did you ever art school? Maybe proFrog conspiracy??? — birdsrightsactivist (@ProBirdRights) May 8, 2015
Here our rule of opposites doesn’t apply — correct spelling just puts us into Default Mode — but then, I’m not really sure how I’d go about spelling something extra fancy.
Internet slang
Certain uses of internet slang can also add a note of sarcasm, especially the vowelless ones: srs bsns, for example, contains a contradiction — how srs can your bsns really be if you’ve disemvowelled it?
Similarly, codeswitching between “you” and “u” can be more intimate, which is sometimes sincere (“i love u” is cuter than “I love you”) but sometimes disingenuous (someone asking “u mad?” might not care deeply about your inner wellbeing).
Hashtags as a class are often add disambiguating meta-commentary, such as my friend’s ~*misandry*~ tag or this gem from academia twitter:
How do I love thee Let me count the [To purchase full text click below] #ElsevierValentines
— Shit Academics Say (@AcademicsSay) February 10, 2015
And of course, there’s the obvious internet sarcasm indicators which go right out and say it in a backchannel, such as </ sarcasm> and #sarcasm.
Entirely deadpan
You can also just be completely deadpan, with no typographical indicators of sarcasm at all. This is a strategy that works — well, kind of — for The Onion:
Beautiful cinnamon roll too good for this world, too pure
Kitten Thinks of Nothing But Murder All Day
But The Onion has a team of professional writers and editors, plus a reputation for parody. Us mere mortals can sarcasm non-typographically with careful phrasing choices, such as adding too many negatives and emphatics (“I definitely did not just spend half an hour debating the relative merits of Bendandsnap Calldispatch versus Ichabbie. Nope. Not me. Never.”)
So, wtf, English?
The first question that might pop into your head on beholding this gorgeous ironic smorgasbord is “Why?” Why are there so darn many ways of expressing sarcasm? Wouldn’t a simple lightning-bolt exclamation mark have been sufficient? And aren’t some of them contradictory? I mean, you can use more punctuation, or less; no capitals, or extra caps — why aren’t we getting confused?
Well, first of all, I mean, why not? There’s no prize for the language with the least possibilities of self-expression. And in person, we’ve got many kinds of silly voices and goofy facial expressions. So as long as people are understanding them, why not have the broadest possible menu of ways to type sarcasm?
There’s the rub though — it works as long as people are understanding. Empirically, we do, even the contradictions, but as a linguist I want to know why. How do we reasonably-savvy residents of the internet know to interpret all these divers methods as sarcasm, even if we haven’t seen a particular one of them before?
My theory is that involves a linguist named Paul Grice. Grice is linguistically famous for coming up with a basic explanation — a series of maxims — for how it is that we’re able to understand each other in conversation. Grice’s Maxims are phrased as commands, but they’re really a description of the assumptions we’re all making about each other when we’re talking. The core maxim is “Be cooperative,” which breaks down into a few sub-maxims:
Maxim of Quality: Try to make your contribution one that is true. (Do not say what you believe to be false. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.)
Maxim of Quantity: Make your contribution as informative as is required. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.
Maxim of Relation: Be relevant.
Maxim of Manner: Avoid obscurity of expression. Avoid ambiguity. Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity). Be orderly.
Here’s an example of Gricean reasoning: suppose I ask you “Would you like some coffee?” and you reply “Coffee would keep me awake.” If I were a LogikBot4000 (or even Siri), I could complain that you haven’t answered my question, but since I’m assuming your response is relevant (Maxim of Relation), I use my knowledge of your sleeping habits and the current time of day to determine whether you’d want to be kept awake right now, add it to my world knowledge that coffee generally contains caffeine and that caffeine makes people wakeful, and therefore conclude whether or not you want coffee.
But the best part of Gricean Maxims is when people appear to break them, because then we can get ~*fancy*~. For example, replying “Coffee would keep me awake” violates the maxim “Be brief”, since of course a simple “yes” or “no” is shorter. And this means that since you bothered to say the longer one, you must have had a reason to do it. In this case, it’s probably politeness: if you meant “no”, the longer version serves as an excuse; if you meant “yes”, the longer version shows your appreciation.
Gricean Maxims explain a whole lot about subtle communication — why too much negation is as bad as not enough (especially in Night Vale), why numbers are weird sometimes, why over-literal younger siblings are annoying, why no one’s actually confused about hyperbolic “literally” — and they also help with sarcasm. The thing about sarcasm is that you’re creating a clash between your literal meaning and what you actually mean, but your interlocutor has to understand that you’re doing so — otherwise, it’s simply lying. But Gricean Maxims say we assume people are trying to tell the truth, so faced with an obvious literal lie, we look for other reasons why they might have said that. In face-to-face communication we can create this clash using tone of voice or body language: you can say “that’s so interesting” with a bright, enthusiastic tone and direct eye contact to convey sincerity, or with flat intonation and rolled eyes to create a mismatch, a conflict that says, “Don’t take the literal meaning of my words at face value.”
Without in-person features, we need other methods to make sure a reader picks up on our intended mismatch. Sometimes it’s really obvious, like </ sarcasm> or #sarcasm. Sometimes it’s slightly more subtle: “quotation marks” could be sarcasm or an actual quote, ~*~sparkly unicorn punctuation~*~ could indicate true enthusiasm or begrudged, enforced cheerfulness. And sometimes it’s truly subtle indeed: misspelling femnsism or birb’s rights or avoiding capitalization and punctuation altogether isn’t necessarily sarcastic. It could simply mean that you don’t care, you didn’t notice, or you’re heavily steeped in internet vernacular. The interesting part is the variation: when you deviate from how people expect you to type in a given context, your punctuation choices take on a greater significance. But just like you have to know how to construct a grammatical sentence in order to speak fluent doge, creative typographical choices are meaningful because they play against a background of routine, default ones.
Let’s put them all together. Here’s a real twitter conversation to analyze:
Gina Trapani: “Heterosexuality is SO WEIRD.”
“You’re watching the Bachelorette again, aren’t you.”
Anil Dash: @ginatrapani DON’T PIN THAT SHIT ON US
Gina Trapani: @anildash sorry, this has The Straights written all over it
Anil Dash: @ginatrapani #NotAllBreeders
How do we know Trapani and Dash are joking? We can see a couple marks of sarcasm: the period instead of question mark on “aren’t you”, and the first-letter-caps of “The Straights” plus minimalist caps and punctuation elsewhere in the tweet. #NotAllBreeders requires cultural knowledge to creates a mismatch — it’s a play on the #NotAllMen hashtag, but Dash distances himself from the people who use #NotAll hashtags unironically by using an uncomplimentary word for his own orientation.
But lest you think I’m grasping at straws and the average person’s texts or posts are more “can’t be bovvered” and less “sophisticated grasp of typographical nuance,” let’s also look something that’s not quite so off-the-cuff. Here’s a passage from Texts from Jane Eyre. Although the premise is “texts from,” we all know that it wasn’t actually tapped out in real-time on a tiny smartphone keyboard — if Mallory wanted to go back and change a capital here or a question mark there, she darn well could have.
JANE
MY LITTLE SUNBEAM
WHERE ARE YOU
I NEED YOU BY MY SIDE
I’m taking a walk
be back for dinner
AH YES MY CAGED SPRITE
COMMUNE WITH NATURE AND UPON YOUR RETURN
RELATE TO ME THE VAGRANT GLORIES OF THE RUINED WOODS
do you really want me to describe my walk to you
MORE THAN ANYTHING YOU POCKET WITCH
it is fairly cloudy out
looks like rain soon
—
I hope you’re packed for India already
I’m not going to India with you, St. John
That’s not what these TWO TICKETS TO INDIA say
You know I don’t want to marry you
Why don’t you marry Rosamond instead?
Take her with you
Marry her?
MARRY HER?
Don’t be ridiculous, I’m attracted to her
That’s disgusting
You are disgusting, Jane
In the textversation between Jane and Rochester, Rochy is in painfully sincere all-caps while Jane is in all-lowercase, while in the one between Jane and St. John, they’re both using mixed, mostly standard capitalization, although Sinjin occasionally bursts into all-caps. It’s clear that Jane is a different person, typographically but also emotionally, when she’s with the two men: she and Rochester are opposites, his exuberance against her reticence; but with St. John she’s more conventional — she does things, like learning Hindi but maybe also using capitals, which she doesn’t really want to. St. John too, is more conventional than he wants to be: he could be a foil for Jane if he let himself type in all caps like he clearly wants to sometimes, but in that case he’d have to admit he’s actually into Rosamund.
And this translates into speech. When I’ve done dramatic readings of Texts from Jane Eyre with friends (which is a perfectly normal thing to do, thank you), all-caps makes us shout, roar, emphasize certain words, or speak with breathless excitement. All-lowercase we render in a flat mutter, a childish sulk (Hamlet), or a wary, restrained, deer-in-headlights voice (Jane). We wouldn’t have nearly as much fun if everything were in Standard Newsreader Voice.
In context, sarcastic typography is part of a larger ecosystem of ways to convey emotional nuance and textual tone of voice — and it’s anything but random. Compared with all these subtle distinctions, a single sarcasm punctuation mark is too blunt an instrument: it defeats the entire saying-without-saying part of sarcasm that makes it engaging in the first place. Using a a percontation point or a SarcMark™ is like explaining why a joke is funny — if you have to bother, you’ve just ruined it anyway.
And no, I see zero irony in coming out against explaining jokes after spending 2500 words explaining how sarcasm works. None whatsoever. Nope.
Tags: beauty, Gretchen McCulloch, language, linguistics, sarcasm, the internet
MARRY ME
MARRY ME FIRST
GROUP WEDDING
LINGUISTIC ORGY?
OK
omg, this was sooo interesting
Hah – for real, I loved this! Never heard of Grice, but I have a feeling I’ll be down a wikipedia rabbit hole today…
For the record, the unofficial working title of this piece was “a linguist explains why Mallory Orberg is funny”.
Ah, what a time to be alive.
Also, it’s because such wow.
Great piece! Maybe it’s a side note, but I was expecting to see a little bit on sarcastic emoticons. Like the Tumblr Left convention of using UWU and the flower-in-hair ASCII face to parody “tolerant” liberalism or the *shrug* guy when you’re being deliberately obtuse. But maybe those are unique to my subset of the interner
Not at all, I’ve noticed them too! Especially flower-in-hair/hold my flower (◡‿◡✿)
I’m not sure if I completely grok uwu yet although I definitely see it too…maybe I need to write something about kaomoji in general though….
I would love to read that article! Tbh I don’t really see the face in UWU either, although I’ve been told that it’s big eyes around an ecstatic cat mouth. Anyway, I just read it as a sarcasm punctuation mark, since I’ve seen it almost exclusively in the context of mocking a person who is very enthusiastic and also very wrong.
You had me at disemvowelled.
“Disemvowelled” was also a bonus for any former jez commenters in the crowd 🙂
BoingBoingism
Okay, did anyone else find themselves somewhat aroused by this article? Language. Internet language. Hngngngngngng
Yessss a new “a linguist explains”
disemvowelled
Ya’ll people seem to think this person made-up that word. They did not.
Counterpoint: What If Nicole Really Does Think Literally All White Men Own All Those Books?
It’s too bad no white man who only owned half of them was available to clear up this possible misconception.
The Toast: The articles are the best, and the commenting community makes them even better.
Wait that article was Satirical? Gahhh… Hahahaha… I don’t own like most of those books. https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/10419946?sh… my own Shelf of read so far. I feel like this is bonethin. But at last… it’s true.
How did I miss it?
If only Nicole had employed an Irony Mark to effectively communicate her jocular tone! This is why women ruin both jokes and the internet.
Every piece you write is interesting, informative, funny, and relevant to my brain.
(I am carefully using proper punctuation and grammar, because I need you to know I mean it.)
For future reference, ENTHUSIASTIC CAPITALIZATION AND PUNCTUATION!!!!!! are also often considered sincere. Not that you have to use them. But, y’know, in case you want OPTIONS.
OPTIONS!!! I want MOAR OPTIONS ~*ALLATIME*~
kthxbai
I do note that stringing two allcaps words together communicates sarcasm, the best example of which is LIBELSLANDER for baseless claims of defamation, which may have originated with Popehat but is spreading on Twitter as the perfect summation of That Person on the Internet Who Thinks All Unfavorable Comments Are Defamatory, or Tom Cruise.
This post is great but it’s not helping my desire to use ~these~ all of the time in my tweets.
Naow, naow… Where does onomatopoeia fit in the sarcastic/ironic online textspeak spectrum?
cool story bro
This was great! Linguistic analysis of the internet continues to be one of the best features on The Toast.
Also, for what it’s worth, I’m a fan of the Sarcästic Umläut, though it’s a bit of a pain to use.
Umlauts and other diacriticals that are placed on top of letters in words in which they don’t belong are never not confusing.
I thought a sarcastic umlaut had more to do with the butterfat content (and implied quality) of the ice cream??
My bf has an actual, necessary umlaut in his last name and I have considered marrying him just to get the umlaut. They are the best! But also they don’t render umlauts on passports, so he is forever trying to prove to pedantic border officials that “Brüpet” and “Brupet*” are the same legal name :/
*not his actual last name.
my now-spouse threatened to leave me for my best pal when they met, cause her surname is a 4-syllable Polish name starting with Z (just one of the ‘z’s in her name!) and the draw of taking her name & becoming Mr. Z…ski was very, very strong.
Can’t say as I blamed him.
OK, serious question here, I’m hoping my fellow Toasties can help me figure this out.
Is the term “sarcasm” no longer linked to contempt or mocking?
I ask because I was trying to wrap my mind around the “appletini” joke. While the lack of punctuation did seem to indicate, “Don’t worry, guys, I’m not actually serious, I know what an appletini is,” I didn’t pick up “sarcasm” as I understand sarcasm. I guess I’ve always thought of sarcasm as something followed by an invisible/inaudible/muttered “Idiot!” But the appletini joke seemed, if anything, to be self-deprecating.
Am I completely missing the joke? Was it skewering someone or something? Was it cutting in some way?
Or does the meaning of “sarcasm” include every instance of “I wasn’t being serious”?
I share this question. It seemed that “sarcasm” and “irony” were used more or less interchangeably but I was of the understanding that they are not.
I think it’s grown to accommodate bad puns or jokes that take a lucridious point of contention seriously – its sarcastic because the joke is of COURSE nobody actually thinks that. Its mocking a straw man and also mocking the Internet’s habit of creating straw men over non-issues
Closed captioners have been using “(!)” and “(?)” to indicate sarcasm for decades! Why do we need to invent anything new?
that is excellent news and information like this is why I read Toast.
I thank you!
Because we don’t look to closed captioners for literally anything but readin’ words
And if you read the article or think about sarcasm for a minute having no symbol kind of makes sense
Then there’s the nerd solution of using html tags:
<sarcasm>I love your poem</sarcasm>
With reference to your previous work and recent happy news: could you please confirm that the collective noun for children of Bulbasaur Charizard is in fact A BABYBATCH OF CUMBERSPROGS….
I dunno, I think we’ll need to come up with a whole list of possibilities. For science, you know.
My hypothesis: unambiguous indicators of sarcasm will always fail precisely because they are unambiguous; part of the humor of sarcasm lies in the possibility, albeit not credibility, of what is said being taken as sincere. The indicators of sarcasm discussed here, both typographic and not, all work because they they can also be confused for sincere statements if we lay aside enough of the context. Sarcastic use or misuse of hashtags or other coded terms associated with (for example) MRA discourse the “right” person might actually use those non-sarcastically, meaning the audience has to know or infer something about the speaker or writer to decode it as sarcasm. (I also think it’s problematic the way online sarcasm tends to use the writing patterns of less educated people as an arch way of demonstrating one’s own intelligence, but that’s an essay for another day).
The other problem with unambiguous indicators of sarcasm is that people like me will use those indicators sarcastically, partly as a sort of intellectual game and partly because anti-social tendencies draw us to fuck with people for no reason.
Yes and yes. I think sarcasm is a way of bonding… of saying you people who get my sarcasm are my peeps, and the idiots who don’t get me are off the team. So we don’t want to make it too obvious, we want our readers to have to work for it, to understand the context to be able to tell the sarcasm from the real stuff, otherwise we’re letting any old fluff in. And the wider the net of interaction, the more subtle and varied our sarcasm needs to be.
I love this SO MUCH. I wish I could have written my entire dissertation with the whole plethora of internet sarcasm indicators. Alas.
is it bad that all i want to do now is come up with ways to use ~*~sparkly unicorn ~*~ punctuation
(Thanks. This was BRILLIANT)
My partner and i has been hoping to notice slightly about sardonic emoticons. Just like the Tumblr Still left meeting regarding making use of UWU as well as the flower-in-hair ASCII confront to be able to parody “tolerant” liberalism or perhaps the particular *shrug* person if you are getting purposely obtuse. Yet possibly people are usually special to be able to my own subset with the interner.
I loved this, all of it.
Linguistics nerd moment from me: when editing things at work, I inevitably find myself cutting out swathes of unnecessary verbiage while singing “Grice, Grice baby” in my head. Thank you for making me feel less freakish for doing that and apologies for any earworm transference.
just for the record: I actually know enough HTML to Stitch together Websites when I’m bored enough or dedicated enough so under most circumstances if I’m being satirical or sarcastic in my replies and such online I will tend to denote it with </sarcasm> largely because it just speaks to my inner HTML geek but also because It’s my convention it’s well established with the people who read what I write and because honestly it’s considerate/polite to actually denote it for people especially if I may be dealing with individuals who are potentially autistic.
I love how this is filed under “Beauty”
Oh man in German it would be Brüpet vs Bruepet I wonder if that would be harder to convince people it's the same!
interesting essay. thank you.
like the idea of *sparkly unicorn* quotes