Worried that work colleagues take your emails too seriously? That your hundreds or thousands of Twitter followers just don't get your urbane, droll, bitingly sarcastic tweets on the latest tech news? Or just want to come across as a surly, uncommunicative teenager once in a while?

Well then, help is at hand (somewhat literally), with the invention of a new punctuation mark called the sarcasm mark, or to give it its awful official name, the SarcMark.

The firm behind it, called Sarcasm Inc, (cha, how long did it take them to think of THAT?) said the SarcMark (yeah, like, whatever), would be available for $1.99 (£1.22) - wow, great value.

Incidentally, the symbol, looks a bit like a paper clip, or a malformed @ key, which is really cool guys!

In a statement the company said, "Statements have the period, questions have the question mark, exclamations have the exclamation mark and when you see the newest punctuation mark for sarcasm, you'll know the writer of that sentence doesn't literally mean what they're writing; they're being sarcastic." Could they BE any more obvious?

Really though, if you have to spell out your sarcasm out with a SarcMark then you're doing it wrong, as you can probably tell from this post.

In fact, Sneak can't help but be reminded of that wonderful scene from The Simpsons in which Comic Book Guy comments on Professors Frink's sarcasm detector with the line "Oh a sarcasm detector, that's a real useful invention."

14 Jan 2010