That’s the “irony mark“, one of a set of proposed additions to punctuation. Others proposed include the doubt point (
), certitude point (
), acclamation point (
), authority point (
), indignation point (
, essentially ¡), and love point (
or 
).
On the one hand, I think the idea of punctuation that can be used to explicitly distinguish some “attitude” aspects of a sentence is a great idea. In a world where there is more and more text-based communication, you can see how it would be useful. At the very least it would mean I never had to see a messageboard post that included <irony> tags. And probably half as many “smilies” as I see now.
On the other hand, the fact that competent writers have been able to convery these things by context and style without explicit punctuation seems to argue that they are unneccesary. Of course, if I only dealt with competent writers in all written communication, this would be a very different world.
On the proverbial third hand, if competent writers can do so much without these proposed new tags in their toolbox, imagine what they could do with them.
Hm…
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