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Ironic Serif: A Brief History of Typographic Snark and the Failed Crusade for an Irony Mark

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Nearly half a century later, in 2007, Pan-European type foundry Underware was commissioned to create a special punctuation mark for the occasion and thus the ironieteken was born — a zigzaggy exclamation point denoting irony. But despite significant buzz across Dutch literary circles — including some criticism that, when placed in a row of several, it bore an unfortunate resemblance to the Nazi swastika — the mark quickly fizzled.

Wikipedia: Irony punctuation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_punctuation

Percontation point

The percontation point, a reversed question mark later referred to as a rhetorical question mark, was proposed by Henry Denham in the 1580s and was used at the end of a question that does not require an answer—a rhetorical question. Its use died out in the 17th century.

This character can be represented using the reversed question mark (⸮) found in Unicode as U+2E2E; another character approximating it is the Arabic question mark (؟), U+061F.

https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/09/27/shady-characters-irony/
March 15, 2026 at 12:04:57 PM EDT *
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