Like We Need Another Punctuation Mark…

I don’t know if this is legit, but this post on Gawker.com is claiming we have another punctuation mark in the stable. The symbol at right is supposed to indicate sarcasm.

This is fantastic news. In a world where only 0.62% of high-school students can tell an m-dash from a hyphen, where the average student graduates from college without ever correctly using a semi-colon, we desperately need some other abstraction to misuse or ignore.

In that rare case where sarcasm isn’t obvious and you just can’t bring yourself to drop in a winking emoticon, this is the symbol for you. And should it fail to catch on for its intended purpose, given its uncanny resemblance to an upside-down “@”, it would always be useful fun as a character to have in your email address.