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I use irony rather often, but in written texts such as email I'm often afraid that it might be misinterpreted by the reader. Therefore I'd like to use an emoticon to make the irony explicit, but I'm not sure which one is most often used for this purpose.

Which one would be most suited?

Dimitri C.
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3 Answers3

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There is punctuation for this purpose.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_mark

ta.speot.is
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  • clever, but -1. that's a *glyph*, not an *emoticon*. this is the former: ؟ ... but this is the latter: :P – quack quixote Mar 12 '10 at 09:40
  • Thanks for your response, but my keyboard doesn't support this symbol, making it rather unhandy in my opinion. – Dimitri C. Mar 12 '10 at 09:53
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    @Dimitri: see http://superuser.com/questions/99640/what-is-the-alt-code-for-irony-mark for typing nonstandard characters with a standard keyboard. – quack quixote Mar 14 '10 at 05:39
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I use :P for this purpose.

geek
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If you are so stupid that you can't write irony in a recognisable form or your reader is too stupid to recognise it when you do use it, just don't use irony at all.

:P

Neal
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