Emoticons.

Natural evolution of human language, or sign of the apocalypse?

Most of the time when you hear something couched in such polarized language, you are facing a false dichotomy. A false dichotomy is, of course, that best of logical fallacies: one asserts that it’s either A or B, with no room for A-and-a-half. “You’re either with us or against us”, no middle ground.

However, with emoticons, you either say “LOL” in your everyday conversation (or if you don’t say it out loud, secretly want to, come on, admit it…), or you cringe every time you see a colon followed by a parenthesis. Ye olde smiley is a bit difficult to be neutral about.

I’ve noticed in myself a tendency to use more and more of these little squiggles, especially in faster-paced and less formal modes of communication, such as on IM. I try not to use them anywhere that I actually spend time proofreading (in this blog, for example), but occasionally they creep in. “In typed communication, the nuances get lost. A smirking face at the end of a line replaces what would be expressed via tone of voice in ordinary conversation” is the way I’ve rationalized.

Which is of course, BS, since many people have expressed infinite nuance and subtle emotion via the written word before this :) got invented. Smiley smacks of laziness and the general decline of literacy, etc etc (this is no doubt why it is so polarizing).

An example: a particular man, who no doubt would have hated emoticons, once said of another person: “I could never learn to like her, except on a raft at sea with no other provisions in sight.” If he’d said ” >:-| I hate that girl!”, it wouldn’t have the same effect.

But we can’t all be Mark Twain. ;-)

Using emoticons feels cheap. You’ll noticed that I winked at you in the above phrase. If we were speaking in person, perhaps I would have actually physically winked. So, let’s try it again.

But we cant all be Mark Twain.

Yeah, I made my own emoticons. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get a very good frowining face . I guess I’m just a naturally happy guy

Now, a test. Let’s see if you like my more personal smilies better than the standard ascii version (or, gods forbid, those frenetic and frightening animated graphical ones that I always turn off in my IM program 5 second after installing it…). I’ll tell you about my day’s culinary adventures.

I had some garlic in the cupboard. It was getting kind of old . I hit upon a neat idea: why not try to roast it? It’s actually quite simple, all it takes is some time in the oven and a little olive oil. That’s precisely what I did. It actually turned out pretty well . I smeared it on some french bread and ate it. I didn’t eat the entire head, eating a whole head of garlic in one sitting somehow seems excessive.

So, what do you think? Am I on to something? Are personal emoticons the way of the future?

PS, if you’re not watching Ze Frank’s Show, you should be

Feed on comments to this Post