Sartalics
WHAT IN THE WORLD ARE SARTALICS?
Sartalics is a way to show that you’re being sarcastic online and don’t really mean what you’re say. Sartalics lean left instead of right, like italics, when you really really mean what you say.
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WHY ON EARTH DO SARTALICS EXIST?
If you’ve ever sent an email or tweet and then had to explain to ten billion people that you were just being sarcastic, this is why. That and because Chrissy Teigen and all these other celebrities asked for it.
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HOW THE HECK DO I COMMUNICATE IN SARTALICS WITH MY DUMB FRIENDS?
In regular text and messaging apps, the most basic way you can show you’re being sarcastic is closing the sarcastic bits of your sentence with backslashes like they’re parentheses.
On the web, you can add the following code into your CSS:
.sartalics { display:inline-block;
-ms-transform: skewX(12deg); /* IE 9 */
-webkit-transform: skewX(12deg); /* Safari 3-8 */
transform: skewX(12deg); }So whenever you want to sartalicize anything, just define their class as class="sartalics".
Big shoutout to @abhijitparida01 for informing me how to get sartalics to work on the same line as normal text!
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WAIT, WHY SARTALICS AGAIN?
There have been a lot of ideas floated for showing that you’re being sarcastic online but let’s surgically destroy each one:
<sarcasm> </sarcasm>
Opening a sarcastic sentence or phrase with the html tag <sarcasm> and ending it with </sarcasm is fine. It sets up the joke in advanced, so the reader's always looking out for the lob. Imagine you’re reading that part in Julis Caesar where Mark Antony give his big, long speech and the words you read on the page goes like:
“For Brutus is an honorable man."
First, there goes the literary device. Second, why did we just read Shakespeare with parenthetical HTML tags?The SarcMark™, /s, #sarcasm
Ending a sentence with a weird-shaped period or hashtag-sarcasm is like saying, “Hey I think you’re cute…psyche!” Sure, if that’s the best way to deliver the punchline, then that’s how it’s gotta be.Co-opting other existing forms of punctuation
In addition to the once-$1.99-now-free SarcMark™, other forms of punctuation were offered as a solution to end misunderstood sarcasm like the interrobang ‽ which is actually just a combined question and exclamation mark and honestly, though we know what the keyboard shortcut is for the interrobang, a ?! already has purpose.
Perhaps the 🙄 emoji would work, but it’d make the Harry Potter novels, like, 10% longer. And again, why wouldn't the emoji have a lightning-bolt shaped scar on its forehead and if it does then why don't we just read a comic book then?
Additionally, ending the sentence with sarcastic punctuation indicates that the entire sentence was sarcastic. But you don’t always italicize the entire sentence you’re emphasizing. If you were using air quotes to show you're being sarcastic, you wouldn't put your hands up in the air and curl your fingers the entire time you're speaking, because that is really strange behavior.
Sometimes, you have to be super precise.Using Comic Sans or aLTeRnAtiNg CaSE
Hate on Comic Sans all you want, but some people don't know about how it's a publicly-shunned font (like Dan Gilbert).
And though I like the theory of alternating cases within the phrase like the Spongebob meme (because constantly pressing the shift key with every other letter is tricky and therefore a deterrent) it's not sustainable for short two or three-letter words. GoT iT?
WAIT, WHY SARTALICS AGAIN?
There have been a lot of ideas floated for showing that you’re being sarcastic online but let’s surgically destroy each one:
1_
The SarcMark™, /s, #sarcasm
Ending a sentence with a weird-shaped period or hashtag-sarcasm is like saying, “Hey I think you’re cute…psyche!” Sure, if that’s the best way to deliver the punchline, then that’s how it’s gotta be.
2_
Using Comic Sans or aLTeRnAtiNg CaSE
Hate on Comic Sans all you want, but some people don't know about how it's a publicly-shunned font (like Dan Gilbert).
And though I like the theory of alternating cases within the phrase like the Spongebob meme (because constantly pressing the shift key with every other letter is tricky and therefore a deterrent) it's not sustainable for short two or three-letter words. GoT iT?
3_
<sarcasm> </sarcasm>
Opening a sarcastic sentence or phrase with the html tag <sarcasm> and ending it with </sarcasm is fine. It sets up the joke in advanced, so the reader's always looking out for the lob. Imagine you’re reading that part in Julis Caesar where Mark Antony give his big, long speech and the words you read on the page goes like:
“For Brutus is an honorable man."
First, there goes the literary device. Second, why did we just read Shakespeare with parenthetical HTML tags?
4_
Co-opting other existing forms of punctuation
In addition to the once-$1.99-now-free SarcMark™, other forms of punctuation were offered as a solution to end misunderstood sarcasm like the interrobang ‽ which is actually just a combined question and exclamation mark and honestly, though we know what the keyboard shortcut is for the interrobang, a ?! already has purpose.
Perhaps the 🙄 emoji would work, but it’d make the Harry Potter novels, like, 10% longer. And again, why wouldn't the emoji have a lightning-bolt shaped scar on its forehead and if it does then why don't we just read a comic book then?
Additionally, ending the sentence with sarcastic punctuation indicates that the entire sentence was sarcastic. But you don’t always italicize the entire sentence you’re emphasizing. If you were using air quotes to show you're being sarcastic, you wouldn't put your hands up in the air and curl your fingers the entire time you're speaking, because that is really strange behavior.
Sometimes, you have to be super precise.
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OH OK. WAIT EXPLAIN HOW AGAIN.
Eventually, hopefully, left-leaning type will be in unicode and gmail and twitter, because there’s everything In Unicode, even 𝖇𝖑𝖆𝖈𝖐 𝖑𝖊𝖙𝖙𝖊𝖗 options.
Black letter is useful and I use it all the time.
So first, a unicode proposal form needs to be filled out. Then once that's approved by the consortium, we can do this. Until then, we have our CSS code and each other.
Sartalics was a BBH Barn project developed by June Kim, Blake Gilmore, and me in 2011.
Featured on Buzzfeed, shown on Huffington Post, Discovery News, Complex, Metro, Dell for the New York Times & it spawned a parody.
