I was reminded the other day of a scene from News Radio where a woman was telling David Foley about how "That's ironic. You know, like rain on your wedding day?", to which Dave replied "No, that's not ironic; that's unfortunate."

It also reminded me of the conversation about the difference between regular ironic and alanis ironic that it inspired with a linguist or two that I know.

It all came back to me when over in fontblog, I read as Kevin Larson introduced the Irony Mark.

Now although there is a French Wikipedia entry for Point d'ironie, I want to make sure everyone understands that we (Microsoft) don't add characters to Windows unless they are in characters that are in Unicode.

Of course that article suggests the possibility of using U+061f (ARABIC QUESTION MARK) for this character, but John Hudson points out in a comment to the fontblog post that this can cause other problems due to RtL and LtR context issues. Not to mention that it won't look like the character in question.

I just didn't want anyone to assume that there were random groups at Microsoft trying to introduce characters that were not in Unicode into our fonts -- because with the exception of the various symbol fonts (which use the Private Use Area), this is something that we try to stay out of as a company.

Even when we are talking about really important characters like Wonder Woman's INVISIBLE JET! :-)

 

This post of course brought to you by "؟" (U+061f, a.k.a. ARABIC QUESTION MARK)