Sarcasm: the final frontier
One thing I’ve been pondering about this evening…
I write a lot of sarky, piss-taking posts on this blog. Sometimes I’ll have a rant about something that I’m not being entirely serious about but which lets off a bit of steam.
The thing is though, what often happens is people take me rather too seriously. Worse, I often kind of forget that I was only really being half-serious at the time and set about defending myself as if it was the most important point of principle ever.
So, to try and ameliorate this, should I include some kind of traffic light system to remind both myself and the reader what my state of mind was when I wrote each article? And how could I stop myself from sarcastically mis-labeling certain blog posts in the interests of winding people up? Is this Hell?
I’m reminded of one of my favourite Simpsons moments:
Rate this:Teen1: Oh, here comes that cannonball guy. He’s cool.
Teen2: Are you being sarcastic, dude?
Teen1: I don’t even know anymore.
(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
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February 6th, 2008 at 8:32 am
I think the W3C should come out with a HTML tag called Sarcasmo:
Gordon Brown is bright, witty and erudite and a quite looker to boot
February 6th, 2008 at 8:34 am
oh it stripped my tags, try again incorrectly:
sarcasmo>Gordon Brown is bright, witty and erudite and a quite looker to boot</sarcasmo
February 6th, 2008 at 9:48 am
Maybe you should look at, rather than a traffic-light based system of sarcastic policy, moving on to a much more advanced, nuanced and multi-layered coded system of sarcasm warning:
* Low - sarcasm is unlikely
* Moderate - sarcasm is possible, but not likely
* Substantial - sarcasm is a strong possibility
* Severe - sarcasm is highly likely
* Critical - sarcasm is expected imminently
The problem is, of course, that you might breach Crown copyright: http://www.mi5.gov.uk/output/Page45.html