punctuation

I absolute love sarcasm. I am a sucker for sarcasm and I believe it is my second language – in all the languages I speak.

I am also a sucker for punctuation, even though I believe I suck at using punctuation correctly. I am always up there and I love stuff like … or “ ” or !!! I am an intense person, so when I write, I try to write with the same intensity I talk.

My very favorite in punctuation are quotation marks: I love to use them! You may use italics to indicate sarcasm or irony also – well, I shouldn’t say that because I am a designer, and glossy and italics are like nail on a chalkboard, but I must recognize that sometimes, italics can do a softer job that quotation marks. But  quotation marks are absolutely my favorite.

sure you do...

Once in a while, you see people abusing the whole concept when they do these airpostrophes, holding up the index and middle fingers of both hands like Dr Evil to imitate quotation marks. I am more of a voice person, so I like to use sarcasm with my tone. Obviously, when writing, one can’t rely on voice, so quotation marks are a good solution.

I read some days ago this wom

an’s post where she injected sarcasm into the word friends to emphasize the negative though she had about them. She mentioned that these “friends” were not good “friends” because they weren’t paying enough attention to her. She meant that these “friends” were not really “friends”. My guess is that, “smart” as she is, she finally realized that these “friends” could care a flying shit about her. These “friends” are, truly, my best friends, so I didn’t hesitate a second to defend them, and at the end, my comment to the post got “mysteriously” removed – could it be because I used too many quotation marks?

When a man asks a woman: ‘is everything ok?’, and she answers “fine” the man knows that “fine” is way far from fine, and he may as well prepare for an escape route, because that “fine” is malice prepense.

But not all quotation marks are limited to sarcasm or irony. When a lover sends an SMS (at the time when the nightclubs push customers out instead of inn) asking ‘do you want some “company”?’, sarcasm or irony is the very last thing in his mind, and for that matter, neither is just “company”. Or when the girls see you sitting down funny and ask curiously if the handsome hero from town was all “that”, and you answer that it was “that” and with way more than “that”, they know that “that” was a good thing, and the sarcasm that will arise at some point after that and it will probably be related to some perfect male anatomy.

For all those ones fabulous people that you write… What is your favorite use of punctuation? The one you hate? The one that is misunderstood?

I think the elipses here add an extra bit of mystery. Perhaps the paint is about dry by now, but may become wet at any time.