I don’t want to be sarcastic but…

I have been known at times to be a little sarcastic. I don’t do this as much as I used to but given the right set of circumstances (a wedding, a divorce, an anniversary, a need to draw attention away from myself) or individual (a queue jumper, a moron, a politician, an attractive genius) I might still hurl a vicious, cutting and bold one-liner encapsulating the hint of caustic, bitter, humour and just derogatory and brutal enough to draw an embarrassed snigger from a captive, and often sycophantic, audience.

Some say that sarcasm is the lowest form of wit. I can’t agree. In order to be successfully sarcastic your chances of success are greatly increased if you are intelligent and sharp, or at the least not mentally incapable of detecting and producing sarcastic remarks – in other words that you are not too ‘nice’. After saying this by no means do I consider myself intellectually superior - sarcasm is my natural state and I don’t have to try too hard. It comes naturally to me - but only because I am clever and quick witted and not always very nice at all.

But that is enough about me, although I’m sure that you find me fascinating. I know I do you. This week a company in America began selling the SarcMark, a downloadable symbol – a dot inside a single spiral line – that can be installed onto any PC running Windows 7, XP or Vista, as well as Macs and Blackberry mobile devices. Once downloaded the SarcMark, a bargain at only $1.99, can be used in Word documents, instant message conversations, email and other programmes, just by pressing Ctrl and the full stop button.

What a great idea – and SUCH a new one [!].

In some languages sarcasm and made-up phrases are indicated at the end of a sentence with a character that looks like the inverted exclamation point ¡, and in subtitles (such as in the old Teletext) an exclamation mark in square brackets is used to mark sarcasm: [!]. Techhies and ether-dudes often use a pseudo-HTML element in front and back of a sarcastic remark in online conversation: {sarcasm} Yeah, that's really going to work {sarcasm}. In instant messaging a ‘rolling eyes’ emoticon is often used, and Karl Marx used an exclamation mark in rounded brackets throughout Das Kapital Volume one.

Lucretia Borgia was known to announce her sarcastic writings with the symbol of a dagger and a single drop of blood before the sarcasm was made {sarcasm} you may rely on the Borgias to always give warning of intent {sarcasm}, and Da Vinci on a few occasions used an ‘S’ with a full point underneath to indicate that he wasn’t being wholly serious 8-)

Even so for those of us dull enough not to be able to recognise sarcasm in the written word I think that at $1.99 it’s a must and I can hardly wait to download it for myself
¡ 8-) [!] (!) {sarcasm} NOT!

If only we could get something similar for the spoken word (!). If only everybody in our wonderfully erudite English speaking landscape could distinguish sarcasm from sincerity by recognising that: when one lowers the fundamental frequency of the voice and speaks with a muuch sloowwer speeeech raaate it usually means that the speaker is being sarcastic and not that they’ve recently had a stroke.

And of course there is always the very popular ‘NOT!’ at the end of a sentence, guaranteed to flag sarcasm to even the dullest (and nicest) moron. Maybe I should invent a SarcFlag, a flag that one raises after making a sarcastic remark. That oughta do it! NOT!

Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, so easy that who really needs the SarcMark? Anyone can understand it and anyone can do it…NOT! As Groucho Marx once said “A child of five could understand this. Fetch me a child of five.”