Snark Mark. Yes... Really.

On this 111th anniversary of Oscar Wilde's losing his duel with the wallpaper, I'm just too tired right now from the adventures of the past couple of days to give you a proper round-up of all the snarkiness that has had to occur in response to some thoroughly absurd events, but I'm not entirely snarked out to the point that I can't share with you this one little gem, to which my friend Nichole alerted me.

There is, friends, such a thing as a punctuation mark that seems to have been created just for me. It is... the snark. I'm not even kidding. I know, you were probably thinking that the Snark Mark is something like the Dark Mark and was created by an evil overlord of snarkiness (me), but I'm serious. It exists. In the world. Not just in my head. It was apparently created by the English printer Henry Denham in the 1580s. I want to travel back in time and kiss him. Except that his breath was probably foul. Because it was the 1580s. And they didn't have toothpaste. Or Altoids.

Here it is:

The Snark. For real.

According to this article, it is also called the Percontation Mark or the Irony Mark. It is my favourite punctuation mark ever. The whole point of its existence is to alert the less verbally astute to the fact that the sentence they've just read might be sarcastic. Or perhaps even downright bitchy. It's like my pal Henry Denham knew that I'd exist one day. Now, we just have to petition our friends at Microsoft to make it readily available in Word. You can make it happen, but you have to remember a string of keystrokes that I am unlikely to recall until I've used it a few hundred times. And I will use it with alarming regularity. I am in love with the Snark. If I ever get more ink, this will be it.

I think I'll have to create a zazzle store just for this. T-shirts. Coffee cups. Excessively bitchy greeting cards. Something like, I'll always love you just as much as I do today⸮ as a caption under a bouquet of dead roses.

But wait, there's more. The interrobang. Seriously.

The Interrobang. Also for real.

The interrobang clearly wins because of its name. It sounds like something from the Urban Dictionary that it might have nefarious connections to breakfast pastries. But it's real. It's the perfect way to sign off a card that says something like Knock, knock, motherfucker‽

Who knew that punctuation could provide hours of snarky fun outside of the notion that 

it saves lives?

I cannot wait to use the Snark and the Interrobang in an email. I suspect that I'll get the chance soon. If the rest of my week is anything like the past couple of days, these will appear regularly.

In the meantime, visit here (and thanks to my incredible helpful technical advisor, Goose at The Penalty Box, for pointing it out to me).

Stay tuned for more in the coming days. In the meantime, I'll remind you once and for all that...

Full Contact Pipe Organ Tuning

is a sport that should not be played by people with hangovers. Ever.