(Online, how do you roll your eyes?)

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In case you were wondering, it’s tarantula mating season again. You can tell because the male tarantulas are making a huge racket in the woods, rubbing the fur off their antlers. That, and the sharp uptick in sales of arachnid Hallmark cards. (“I only have eight eyes for you”)

Well, of course I made that up. Spiders can’t buy Hallmark cards, or anything else, because they don’t have any pockets.

What you just read is what is known as sarcasm. Or not. Those might have been sardonic remarks, or just humorous comments, not to mention a staggeringly ignorant grasp of biology.

Sarcasm in print can be hard to spot, as you know if you’ve ever had to apologize for an email at work, or found yourself defending a facebook post. And there’s only so far you can go with a winking smiley face. (Some people online think you can signify increased sarcasm by inserting multiple winky smileys, and I don’t ever want to be stuck at dinner with those people.)

And speaking of things I don’t want to mate with, relationship-ready tarantulas are officially on the prowl, searching the desert for hot eight-legged sex. According to the National Park Service, the big hairy spiders will be sexually active till October when, like any other male, they lose interest in girls due to the onset of college football.

That previous paragraph might have been sarcasm, too. I know it’s hard for the social media generation to tell if I was being sarcastic or not, because I didn’t end a single sentence with LOL. (Some people online think you can intensify your sarcasm by over-typing non-existent acronyms like LOLOLOL – which I guess literally means “laughing out loud out loud out loud.” If you’re one of the people who are doing that, please stop doing that.)

It turns out there’s a whole lot of professional career-type people spending a great deal of grant money trying to determine what sarcasm is, when it’s being used, and how to detect it in non-face-to-face conversations…situations like texting, social media, and trying to communicate with those ridiculously lame squawk systems they always have at fast food drive-thrus.

According to one linguist, humans have been trying to come up with ways to indicate sarcasm or irony since the 1500s, shortly after Johannes Gutenberg invented the first paperback (title: Debbie Doeth Dallas). One of the first suggestions was something that looked like a backwards question mark, which its inventor called the percontation point. (literal translation: making little double-quotes in the air with your fingers)

Later, in the 1600s, somebody suggested using an upside-down exclamation point, but then William Shakespeare released Hamlet and the literary world got sidetracked by more pressing questions, like “What the heck kind of a name is Yorick?”

Although I can’t immediately bring to mind any iambic pentameter penned by spiders, it’s likely that currently rutting tarantulas are depending on poetry, or music, while wooing their tarantulettes. (After all, they can’t count on Hallmark cards.) Scientists tell us that the male tarantula’s mating ritual is to find a female’s burrow, then weave a web just above the ground and hang out until she has to pop out for insects, or ice cream. So the male (Romeo) is perfectly positioned to spout poetry just below Juliet’s balcony, as it were, which may or may not have been sarcasm on my part, but it’s without question the clumsiest metaphor I’ve ever used.

Other Sarcasm Ahead! suggestions over the years have included a lightning bolt-shaped exclamation point, or wrapping the sarcastic comment in tildes, or ornamenting the irony with the Greek letter psi, which basically looks like a limp trident, or a menorah that got short-changed. And of course, today’s thumb-typing stylists simply settle for LOL (laughing out loud), JK (just kidding), ROFL (rolling on the floor laughing), ROFLMAO (rolling on the floor laughing my anatomy off), or ROFBMCAOF (rolling on the floor because my clothes are on fire).

Personally, I hope mankind will continue to search for a functional sarcasm indicator. See, the thing about sarcasm is that you’re creating a clash between your literal meaning and what you actually mean, but your audience has to understand that that’s what you’re doing; otherwise, you’re just lying.

But let’s not drag Congress into this.