Re: Rhetorical questions.

On Sat, 2 Oct 2004 00:13:41 +0930, Adrian Morgan (aka Flesh-eating Dragon) <dragon@...> wrote:
> So having established that I do not advocate the need or use for a
> rhetorical question mark, let me reiterate the philosophy - familiar
> to all of us - that just because something isn't useful in practise
> doesn't imply that it can't be fun to design! Rejecting the 1580s
> version, I have submitted two designs for a rhetorical question mark
> and have illustrated both of them in Courier, Times and Arial fonts
> here: <http://web.netyp.com/member/dragon/temp/rhetorical.gif>. The
> first of the two designs was my original and still my favourite; I
> submitted the second later in an attempt to cater for people who are
> attached to the notion that sentence-concluding punctuation should
> always have a dot at the base. Other people have made other
> suggestions, but I'll just mention my own for now; if I'm asked then I
> will mention the others.
>
> I just thought this would be of passing interest to conlangers, who
> would probably have interesting opinions to add.
How about something that won't make Unicode cry ? I like the idea of using a
spaced mark like the previous, which (to me) gives the little air of detachment
a rhetorical question wants. Of course, that kills the joy of designing a
character... myself if pressed would probably use an inverted question mark --
not a rotated one, like in Spanish, but actually inverted, like a
better-articulated form of the Greek semicolonic question mark.

What I'd really like to see is a mark or style of type to indicate _sarcasm_[1]. I
always envisioned for it maybe using italics, but slanted the \other\ way.


	*Muke!
[1] "Irony", for the pedants.
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