~Well, aren’t you clever? ~

 

For anyone not writing with a pen and paper, possibility is limited by the keyboard. Its face offers up a finite palette of character options with which we must express the infinite number of thoughts, opinions and attitudes posted into the internet space each day. With so much to be said that is not just words, the problem of how to communicate meaning without access to facial expression and tone of voice is critical. The problem is not new, but it is bigger – exponentially so, with more and more words being delivered detached from their (increasing number of) communicators.

 

So, how to avoid being misunderstood in what writer Joseph Bernstein calls  ‘the infinite scale and infinite scorn’ of the digital opinion world?1 There is a long and illustrious history of attempts to introduce a mark denoting irony.A Then along came the internet and suddenly it seemed that what was required was a mark for sarcasm – a subtle but important shift (downwards?!). Amongst the suggestions for new (sometimes rather outlandish) marks, in a 2001 blog post writer Tara Liloia described the need for something to demarcate sarcasm in online communications. There was clearly a punctuational gap there, she thought, at that time being filled only by the winking smiley,B but ‘he isn’t really a professional tool. You can’t write a missive to a business associate with little cutesy ASCII faces in it. It’s just not done.’2 What she proposed was the tilde. Perhaps because it was there, on her keyboard, not already carrying an indisputable meaning (away from a mathematical context, at least).

 

How did it get there?

 

The tilde came, alone, to the computer keyboard from the mechanical typewriter in an act of international thriftiness. If a way could be found to allow Spanish and Portuguese typists to create characters such as ñ and ã, without sacrificing whole precious keys to them, a single typewriter model could be sold across countries. And so ~ was detached from its letters and made a shift function. As a relative latecomer, it is one of the few punctuation marks available without a fixed and solidly recognised meaning,3 so there it sits, a punctuational vacuum, available for whatever the user thinks right to employ it for.

 

Liloia thought it worked to show sarcasm. Her particular proposed use of it didn’t quite take off, perhaps because it’s questionable whether sarcastic remarks have any place in ‘missives to a business associate.’ But they clearly do have a place somewhere. What arena is more buzzing with sarcasm, with knowing jokes, than that of social media? Or, as Bernstein puts it, his ‘digital-media-heavy, arch, sincerity-averse Twitter feed’? The tilde has resurfaced here, and thrives. Its use is not so far from Liloia’s. Is there something particular in its form that makes it a natural choice for this, over any of the other ‘spare’ punctuation marks on the keyboard?

 

In his essay Punctuation Marks, Adorno writes that each punctuation mark when examined individually ‘acquires a definitive physiognomic status of its own, an expression of its own, which cannot be separated from its syntactic function but is by no means exhausted by it.’4 What, then, can we tell about the tilde from its face? What, if any, inherent character has this character? Its wavy form has a flexibility, a lack of gravity that says “I don’t take myself too seriously”. On a face it would be a wry, knowing smile. As a face it is silly, excited.C

 

Bracketed around a word or phrase it surrounds them with energy, with a breakdancing arm-wave. For Adorno, quotation marks are for ‘when the text wants to distance itself from a word it is referring to’ and the tilde carries this further. It waves at us from the screen, both attracting and distracting attention while any serious commitment to the meaning of the words, should they be embarrassing or problematic, wiggles jauntily away.

 

This is a slippery and ungraspable meaning, changing subtly with each use by each user around each word. Exact signification is not the tilde’s strong point (though that’s another story).5 Bernstein sums it up thus: ‘Placing tildes around web words unquestionably does something to them, something destabilizing and a little uncanny, and while it’s true that there are common deployments ... it’s also true that no pair of tildes reacts the same with any word or words. And who’s to say we’re all reading them the same?’

 

If the very shape of ~ is a Barthesian image, there is no anchorage here. We cannot look to the text for help with a preferred reading because our sender is being deliberately diffuse. Or vice versa. The best that we can pick out is that our tilde-image and text relay a sense of ambivalence on the sender’s part about the chosen words. But they’re gonna say them anyway. In justifying the creation of his (tilde-related) sarcasm mark, the Snark, typographer Choz Cunningham wrote: ‘Just like one takes skis and jackets on a trip to the snow, or doesn’t dig a hole without a shovel, the tools of our language should be whatever is appropriate to where we are going.’6 And so what does it say about the current level of internet rhetoric if a frenetic, hyper-self-aware discourse of opinion, in-jokes, and recurrent backlash creates the need for new  punctuation? Maybe we should say ~thank goodness~ that the tilde was there for us.

 

Or perhaps in certain instances we should question this particular use of ~. Its ability to ‘strip words and phrases of their baggage, and render their meaning and implications inoffensive, fun’ can be useful for those who want to use a problematic word or phrase that really, if stated seriously, might leave them open to reproach. Or at least not paint the image that the writer would like to give; say, in the case of US Cosmopolitan magazine’s twitter feed, which has frequently used the tilde around certain rather tired or predictable ‘women’s magazine’ clichés.D Arguably this use of ~ as a ‘get out clause’ means that no-one has to take responsibility for their words, and we could ask whether distancing ourselves from a problematic phrase or subject means that some things which ought to be addressed are left untackled?