Tone indicator

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This article is about the symbols appended to text to portray intent. For phonetic tone representation, see Tone (linguistics) § Phonetic notation. For other uses, see Tone.

A tone indicator is a symbol attached to a sentence or message sent in a textual form, such as over the internet, to explicitly state the intonation or intent of the message, especially when it may be otherwise ambiguous.

History[]

Early attempts to create tone indicators stemmed from the difficulty of denoting irony in print media, and so several irony punctuation marks were proposed. The percontation point (⸮; a reversed question mark) was proposed by Henry Denham in the 1580s to denote a rhetorical question, but usage died out by the 1700s.[1] In 1668, John Wilkins proposed the irony mark, using an inverted exclamation mark (¡) to denote an ironic statement. Various other punctuation marks were proposed over the following centuries to denote irony, but none gained popular usage.[2] More recently, in 1982, the emoticon was created to be used to denote jokes (with :-)) or things that are not jokes (with :-().[3]

The syntax of modern tone indicators stems from /s, which has long been used on the internet to denote sarcasm.[4] This symbol is an abbreviated version of the earlier /sarcasm, itself a simplification of </sarcasm>, the form of a humorous XML closing tag marking the end of a "sarcasm" block, and therefore placed at the end of a sarcastic passage.[5]

Internet usage[]

On the internet, one or more tone indicators may be placed at the end of a message. A tone indicator on the internet typically takes the form of a forward slash ("/") followed by an abbreviation of a relevant adjective. For example, "/srs" may be attached to the end of a message to indicate that the message is meant to be interpreted in a serious manner, as opposed to, say, being a joke (which is commonly represented as "/j"). Tone indicators are used to explicitly state the intent of the author, instead of leaving the message up to interpretation.[6][4]

List of common tone indicators on the internet[7]
Abbreviation Meaning
/s Sarcastic
/srs Serious
/j Joke
/hj Half-Joke
/pos Positive
/neg Negative
/g Genuine
/p Platonic
/c Copypasta
/lh Light-Hearted
/nm Not Mad

See also[]

References[]

  1. ^ Truss, Lynne (2003). Eats, Shoots & Leaves. p. 142. ISBN 1-59240-087-6.
  2. ^ Houston, Keith (2013). Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols & Other Typographical Marks. New York & London: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. pp. 212–217. ISBN 978-0-393-06442-1.
  3. ^ "Original Bboard Thread in which :-) was proposed". cs.cmu.edu. Retrieved October 12, 2021.
  4. ^ a b Zuckerman, Ori Manor (2021-10-08). "Council Post: The Importance Of Subtext In Digital Communications". Forbes. Retrieved 2021-10-12.
  5. ^ Khodak, Mikhail; Saunshi, Nikunj; Vodrahalli, Kiran (7–12 May 2018). "A Large Self-Annotated Corpus for Sarcasm" (PDF). Proceedings of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference: 1. arXiv:1704.05579. Bibcode:2017arXiv170405579K. Archived (PDF) from the original on 9 February 2019. Retrieved 8 February 2019.
  6. ^ "Tone Is Hard to Grasp Online. Can Tone Indicators Help?". New York Times. December 9, 2020. Archived from the original on 12 August 2021. Retrieved 23 August 2021.
  7. ^ "a guide to tone indicators". a guide to tone indicators. Retrieved 2022-02-21.
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