Please Be Understood

Everyone is making New Year’s resolutions to make this year better than last. It occurs to me that there is one thing that may improve communications in the comments threads muchly.

I would like to propose that we begin to use the sarcasm tag.

It looks like this:

/s

Or this </s>

And it means “This past sentence was not completely serious.”

This is important when dealing with religious Jews, because anyone left or right of normal (read: oneself) often has extreme ideas that are, let’s face it, just plain nuts. Since insanity is a common malady among our own,  our internal Nonsense Meters have a very high activation threshold, and frequently do not go off when they should.

In other words: we take each other seriously when we shouldn’t.

Hence the need for the </s> tag.

For those looking at it funny, the tag comes from HTML, the language used to write basic web pages.  Attributes are assigned to text by sandwiching them between tags. For example, <b>this will bold</b> text. The slash means “done with this attribute.” So </s> means “I have finished being sarcastic.”

Sarcasm gets a bad rap. But let’s face it – life without verbal irony would be so much less fun. And so much less Jewish. So step up, folks. Try it out.

Advertisement