Sarcasm from Greek (sarkasmos), 'mockery, sarcasm' is sneering, jesting, or mocking at a person, situation or thing. It is strongly associated with irony, with some definitions classifying it as a type of verbal irony intended to insult or wound — stating the opposite of the intended meaning, e.g. using "that's fantastic" to mean "that's awful". ***************************8 It is used mostly in a humourous manner, and is expressed through vocal intonations such as over-emphasizing the actual statement or particular words. Use of sarcasm is sometimes viewed as an expression of concealed anger, annoyance and/or ignorance. Fyodor Dostoyevsky defined sarcasm as "the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the privacy of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded."******As the vocal intonations used to express sarcasm are subtle, the use of sarcasm to express thoughts that are not obviously ironic may lead to confusion. This is especially true where there are differences in accent or experience with the language in use.************Because it is vocally oriented, sarcasm can be difficult to grasp in written form and is easily misinterpreted. To prevent this some people emphasize words with italics, bold, capitalization, and/or underlining (e.g. that’s just great); sarcastic comments on the Internet with an emoticon; or surround them with a made-up markup language tag, e.g. *sarcasm*, <sarcasm> or <snicker>. Writers in the UK and some other countries have adopted the use of (!) (An exclamation mark in parentheses) following speech in which sarcasm or irony is perceptible via the tone of voice, a punctuation mark which is very regularly seen in subtitles. Whilst this happens it is not universally the case. for example Shakespeare regularly used sarcasm as a literary tool to emphasize a point or joke and rarely ever used quotation marks or italics. This has been a recent development and is sign posted as a dumbing down of literature by many within the British canon. Some have speculated that sarcasm could be at least partially motivated by cognitive dissonance.</snicker></sarcasm>