Irony font

 I talked last time on this blog about Keith Houston's book on the history of typographical marks, Shady Characters; but it has inspired another thought I wished to impart. 

In his final chapter, Houston recounts the appalling number of times people have proposed creating some sort of special typographical or punctuation mark to distinguish irony and sarcasm from straightforwardly-intended prose. It appears the same idea has been floated—and even some of the same designs for the hypothetical mark put forward—so many times that the whole subject has become almost as tired as the debate around whether or not the incidents described in Alanis Morissette's "Ironic" are actually ironic. 

As Houston convincingly shows, the arguments for creating such a mark—whether themselves seriously or ironically presented—have always been the same: currently, it's impossible to distinguish a satirical from an earnest piece of writing by typography alone. A Modest Proposal could have been written by someone making a point; or by someone who sincerely believed that the English should start eating Irish babies. The text does not come out and say which one it is. The only way to tell is by context, history, some baseline understanding of human psychology, etc. 

The arguments against establishing a special irony mark are equally unvarying (to such an extent that they have become "hoary," in Houston's phrasing). First: if you have to mark something out as irony, you've most likely already killed the joke. And second: might not the linguistic adept make an ironic deployment of the irony mark itself? Could the use of an irony mark be ironically intended? In which case it's actually meant in earnest; in which case... and we are soon lost hopelessly in a recursive spiral. 

After concluding the painful roster of instances in which this same idea has been tried and failed, Houston reaches at last a sound conclusion: we already have an irony mark. The internet has decided it for us. No one needed to stage an advertising campaign or write a treatise to recommend it. It just emerged. The emoticon. More specifically, the winking smiley face. ;-) If we append it to something, the other person knows we are kidding. Irony successfully demarcated. Problem solved. 

This is all plausible enough. However, there is one difficulty still with us. After all, the winking smiley surely serves well enough to alert readers to the presence of irony in some circumstances—namely, friendly ones, in which the irony is warmly intended. You might append the winking face to, say, a congratulatory message to a loved one who has just won an award, in which you say something like "I always knew you were the best! (Not that I'm biased or anything)" *Wink*

But such circumstances surely do not exhaust the entire domain of irony. Sometimes, we are not being warm. Sometimes, we want to caricature a view, say. We want to say something in a deadpan voice, not because we believe it, but precisely because we do not believe it; it is the opposite of what we believe; and we wish to mock its obvious extravagance and absurdity. This is one of the most common kinds of irony on the internet. Yet it is also the most dangerous. As has been observed before, there is no utterance possible in that forum so intrinsically ridiculous that someone will not take it literally. 

This, then, is where some sort of irony mark might still be desired, and for which the winking face does not suffice. 

Turning back to Houston's book, we discover hints toward a solution. He notes that, among the various proposals made historically for offsetting sarcasm and irony, not all required an actual mark. In some cases, people proposed that ironic statements ought to be distinguished by a unique font, a particular means of emphasizing the words, etc. 

That's when it struck me. Here, once again, the internet has already solved the problem. And it didn't take anyone consciously promulgating the solution. It just emerged organically from the collective unconscious mind. For, if one is on Twitter long enough, one will start to see statements made in a highly distinctive mode of expression: they will be written out aS lEtTeRs iN aLtErNaTiNg capitals and lower-case. And, for some reason, when a sentence is presented in this way; it is clear it is intended ironically. 

Why does this work? I guess because it makes the text appear loopy and cockeyed. When mentally processed as sound, it comes out as mechanically varying in intonation as if it were being read by an automaton, rather than a person with a grasp on ordinary language. 

Example: Suppose someone points out something appalling that Republicans just did, and someone replies in the comment thread: "But Democrats also do bad things." It ought to be clear enough from the fact that the statement is itself an infantile non sequitur that it is intended ironically. But suppose that people who are at home among infantile non sequiturs take it at face value. To attend to this danger, increasingly on Twitter one will see the hypothetical comment presented as follows: "bUt dEmOcRaTs AlSo dO bAd tHInGs." Irony made unambiguous. 

And so the linguistic community has already once again invented through sheer volume of chatter what the intelligentsia had merely bemoaned the lack of. The irony font has already been born, and no one needed to herald it. As to whether it will itself soon be ironically deployed, that is another question. It most likely will, and humanity will once again be thrust back into its original perilous situation: that of having to rely on common sense.