Ron Savage

This is sure to revolutionise online communications!

From the linked article:

A typographer, who operates from glennmcanally.com, has launched a new website as the “official site of the sarcastic font movement”, with the terminally sarcastic invited to download and use the new “arial sarcastic” font, which leans backwards in an attempt to denote sarcasm [...]

What if I want to emphasize a sarcastic text by italicizing it? The sarcasm back-italic and emphasis forward-italic will cancel each other out. There should be an orthogonal way to denote sarcasm which won't conflict with italic, bold, underline. Perhaps an overline or whatever.

Gee, this surely does not take the fun out of sarcasm.

There is a convention that to emphasise text within an expanse of italic text, you use roman type (i.e. normal, upright letters).

So perhaps the same could be applied to backwards italics.

Ok, so we change backwards italic to upright when we want to be sarcastic within sarcasm. But to emphasize within sarcasm? Or sarcastize an emphasis?

Overlines are not a great idea as they just look like the line above has been underlined.

True. Although technically the overline could be drawn just above the x line, before the ascender, to make it less ambiguous.

I'm proposing another idea to denote sarcasm: by filling all the letters' holes (association left as exercise for the readers). Although ideally all the text that is not sarcasm should not have holes, and the text that is are the one with holes.

We must get this right. The discussions we're having on this blog article are sure to effect the way future generations communicate for hundreds of years.

I see what you did there.

Great, I have such a good grasp of grammar.