solitude sunday

solitude sunday is our day to spend time with a book. my journey with shady characters: the secret life of punctuation, symbols & other typographical marks by keith houston is completed with today's chapter about irony and sarcasm.  h.l. manken stated that there should be punctuation for irony/sarcasm because readers were too clueless to understand when writers were being such. the symbols proposed for irony/sarcasm were the forerunners to the modern emoticons. in fact, emoticons are very old! the first such characters to express emotion were published in PUCK magazine march 30, 1881. they characters were hand drawn as there was no typeface yet for emoticons. but the point was made and the rest is, as is said, history.