There was Henry Denham, a British printer who used a mirrored question mark (؟) to distinguish rhetorical questions in 1575, and John Wilkins, a British natural philosopher, who proposed an inverted exclamation mark (¡) to indicate irony in 1668. After them, there were three centuries of French writers proposing variously shaped “points d’ironie”—Jean-Jacques Rousseau noted the need for one in 1781, Alcanter de Brahm in 1899 proposed another version of ؟, and Hervé Bazin in 1966 proposed the Greek letter ψ with a dot below. In more recent years, a backwards-slanting italics known as “ironics”
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