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by nicklaf 3174 days ago
Try covering up the names of these while guessing what each is supposed to symbolize. Personally, I found some of these to be rather unintuitive and sometimes arbitrary.
4 comments

Would exclamation or question marks be intuitive if we'd never seen them before? Not that I think we should be adding more punctuation, but I don't know that we use '?' to question because it naturally looks like it's questioning something.
Interesting. I hadn't previously thought about the form of those punctuation marks.

Upon looking at them, a dot intuitively ends a sentence. A dot with a line intuitively ends a sentence with emphasis, and a dot with a meandering line questions.

From that perspective a question mark really does indicate uncertainty and possibly a question.

This is the same excuse I use to avoid learning Japanese. Just a bunch of unintuitive arbitrary characters!
Welcome to orthography.
They're not real. It's a joke.
People have been proposing some of these for a long time (nearly 400 years)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_punctuation#Irony_mark

Yes. But that doesn't make it less of a joke.
The best part of the joke is that we are standardizing at `/s`.
The interrobang is real, but that's the only one I think.
It's not real. The symbol might be attributed some meaning, but it's not real punctuation and definitely shouldn't be.
Define "real"
Wow. It didn't take long to go from punctuation to philosophy.
It's been in use for about a half century; it's typically described as “nonstandard”, though given the absence of a standards body for English it's not clear what that means.

It's definitely “real” in the sense of being in actual use in the wild with a clear and well-understood meaning.

People use it; it's real.
Real or not the Sarcmarc would help sooo much.
Don't people already use /s for this?
They do and I think its an argument for the sarcmark.
On the other hand, I can type "/s" with my keyboard right now and it's not copyrighted.
Still people type the ‽ all over this thread (can't handle Windows without the awesome WinCompose)…
No it wouldn't.

It'd help as much as a new meme on the internet helps the world.