Sartalics is an interesting concept, if you can get the font, and if the font is on the recipient's machine (otherwise you get a substituted font).
For close to 10 years now I've been trying to use the following to convey sarcasm: -)
The two characters imply "tongue in cheek." Picked it up on a pre-emoticon website that had all the text character combos then in use. Unfortunately, it never caught on. After receiving enough "What does that -) mean?" comments, I just gave up on it.
How does Thomas Gainsborough's Blue Boy fit in here? It was painted in the 1770s.
Although I like the idea of left-leaning italics, to my knowledge, the use of /sarcasm after the phrase, or (/sarcasm) if the phrase is in the middle of a sentence, is already fairly well established. I presume it has to do with the use of tags in programming (a word I use loosely) HTML. For instance if you wanted to bold something in HTML, you would put a <b>whatever text you want</b>, and whatever text is between the b and /b is bolded by the browser reading the HTML, just as typing out <center>text here</center> would center that text in the middle of the space the text would appear. The use of /sarcasm, therefore, would indicate that the previous phrase up until that point if unclear by the language itself.
Example:
A: So I was thinking about using grape soda instead of milk on my cereal. Would that work?
B: Well, I can't imagine how that wouldn't.. /sarcasm
Switching topics, there's a typo in the summary of the episode where this is episode is more formally listed.. under the swivet section, the example uses "swivel" as if spell-check caught it and changed it. Also, the link for "this episode" at the end of the charientism section has a stray carriage return tag (or a misplaced double quote from the anchor tag) in the address linked, creating a 404.
I think "downgrade" is already well enough established and is a bit more intuitive than having to guess what another term might mean -- but I quite like "new-coked" over flupgrade, or perhaps flubgrade to emphasize the "flub" since the "up" still seems to suggest improvement to me.
You might have mentioned that newspapers nowadays do post lengthy classified ads (the paper locally does anyway, in north Texas) titled "Call for Bids" before describing at length a proposed construction details and necessary specs of the project.
A possible other phrase that I just thought up, when reading my own post back to myself to edit it, is "using the entities" when one finds oneself needing to go into deeper-than-expected detail to get a point across. Web browser programs read HTML (hyper-text markup language) to display things onscreen, which are generally enclosed by less-than and greater-than symbols to tell the browser, "this is the start of something you need to format, instead of display as typed" such as <center> to center something instead of showing the word "center".. In order to get an HTML tag to show up as if it were regular text, I had to use "special entity" codes that would tell the browser to display the less-than/greater-than symbols instead of interpreting them as tags. And, in order to type out the special entity code, I have to use a special entity code even still. The special entity code for less than, < is typed out in the coding as < (and in order to make the browser display < and not interpret it as instruction to display a less-than symbol, I had to type in &lt; .. and in order to display &lt; I had to type &amp;lt; ..etc)..
I need to disagree with Grant when he said that bar tender had the same root and definition as as the verb "tender" meaning to offer. A bar tender is one who tends or takes care of the bar. Even though it makes some sense to think of the the bar tender as one who makes an offer of drinks, the history of the word says you have another think coming.