Nuts and Bolts: percontation marks.

 This is a percontation mark:

It was invented in 1580, or about then, by Henry Denham (though not named by him) and it signals...well, whatever you want it to signal. Basically, it means what I've just written isn't quite as straightforward as it might appear.

Yes, it's a kind of irony mark. 

You might say that if the percontation mark had been needed then we would already be using it, but perhaps its time has now come. We have a global...um...globe, which means that a lot of people are having to communicate in a second or third language.

A percontation mark could be the written equivalent of that astonishing habit Americans have of saying only joking after they've made a joke. (This is astonishing to an English person because in England practically everything anyone says is likely to be a joke. Even Good morning.)

Having spent most of my life trying to learn to write clearly and amusingly, I feel about the percontation mark the way a portraitist must feel about photographs. 

But I suppose they're better than emojis, #joke, or (!), anyway.

Thing To Consider Today: percontation marks. A percontation is a question which requires more than a yes or no answer. The Oxford dictionaries point the word's English origin to Henry Cockeram in the 1600s. In Latin percontāre means to enquire or interrogate. The word comes from contus, which means, most surprisingly, boat-pole. 

The unicode for the percontation mark is U+2E2E.

Now I just need to find out what unicode is...