Irony Makes Its Mark

Keith Houston’s 2013 book Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols & Other Typographical Marks has a chapter on the surprisingly extensive historical effort to put forth a punctuation mark that indicates irony. In his Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668), John Wilkins proposed an inverted exclamation mark for this purpose. Nearly two centuries later, Jean-Baptiste-Ambroise-Marcellin Jobard created an “irony point,” which Houston describes as “a “tri...