The Uptalk Mark
Due to the prevelance of of HRT (High Rising Terminal) as noted in the wild for quite some time by linguists (not necessarily as prescriptive, mind, except in certain circumstances too numerous to cardinalize here), we the undersigned propose the use of the punctuation “^?” to indicate.
[Those in support, please indicate so in the comments.]
Background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_rising_terminal
The “Norwegian phonology” aspect of it certainly gives one pause and adds a definite savoir faire or teft to our concept (if we can believe die Googlemaschine’s Norwegian translation).
This article indicates das GM, but our Fun In Frankfurt Frommer’s suggests that maschine is feminine; so we will go with die until corrected:
Let’s use this in a sentence:
“If you don’t order something, I’m going to have to call my manager^?”
[The preceding is a quote from memory from an old video game where the character was manning the drive-thru restaurant lane and the customer was not being alacritous in speaking his order.]
The Wiki explains it better than this amateur aficionado of voice accents can, but the general concept is to make a verbal statement, but in the form of a question.
Now with our (not) patented uptalk mark “^?”, your writing can capture the essence of this notable postmodern speech inflection.
As to the Wiki’s section on Implications For Gender, we find this to be speculative and maybe also simply wrong, as this type of inflection is prevalent among various and sundry peoples of these United States; skewing — but not exclusively — younger, as noted by our extensive background research team [data pending].
Our crack team of analysts determined that there may be a difference among genders in deployment of the “^?” verbally, but high p-values from paired sample T-Tests [From IBM no less! Big Blue!] indicated that such differences were not statistically significant. To be sure, our analysis may have been confounded by the subject’s age, income, geolocation (lat/long to 6 sigfigs), and other such tertiary variables, which are — it almost goes without saying — (tertiary to) secondary interactions.
Regarding our other punctative proposal of the “questio-semi-colo-sclamation mark,” we shall leave that for another day.
