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                                     :):):)     by John Hargrave

It's time to lose the smileys, people.

You know what I'm talking about. Those hateful sideways smiley faces called emoticons. A typical e-mail containing one of these hell-bred symbols might read like this.

But you know that Jackie. She loves her cheese. ;)

The strange punctuation at the end is an emoticon. Its intention is to convey an emotion that the writer, with her absence of writing skills, couldn't. Apparently, you're supposed to tilt your head sideways to gather that the writer is winking at you, recalling the sly inside joke involving Jackie and cheese.

Now, I'll be the first to claim that e-mail is a stunted medium - even more so than the telephone, since you not only lose the subtle nuances of facial expression, but the tone of voice. However, e-mail's greatest advantage is the way it combines the thoughtfulness of letter-writing with the disposability of phone calls. And for Heaven's sake, the art of letter-writing has been around for centuries! Do we see a wacky %} in Mozart's letters to his father? Does Saint Paul insert a zany 8*> in his Epistle to the Romans?

Let's face it: emoticons are the digital equivalent of teenage girls who dot their i's with hearts and flowers. They're for people who like Garfield. They're a step away from posters of a cat hanging from a branch with the caption, "Hang In There!"

It's time to lose the smileys, people.

During high school, I played the violin. There was a horrible sound related to violins that gives me chills to this day, far worse than fingernails down the blackboard: the wretched screech of scraping sticky resin off the strings with a dry washcloth. SCRITCH! SCRITCH! And whenever I see one of those emoticons, it's the same feeling. SCRITCH! SCRITCH!

Emoticons have spawned a whole breed of digital cute-isms. The ubiquitous <g>, standing for "grin," serves the same purpose as :). My God, have we lost our writing skills so completely that we are unable to convey humor without pointing it out as blatantly as an episode of "America's Funniest Home Videos"?

Then there are the acronyms: LOL for "laughing out loud," ROFL for "rolling on the floor laughing," and LMAO for "laughing my ass off." It troubles me that the Net is chock-full of such endless merriment and mirth. Why aren't there acronyms such as PMO for "pissed me off," FBM for "foul bitter mood," or MDT for "manic-depressive time"? Why is everyone so friggin' happy?

All these things, however, serve a more important purpose, and that is to give us even more jargon to prove we're part of the third-wave digerati club. Newbies have no clue why we're writing <smile> and ;] at the end of our sentences, and that's how we show them we know more than they do.

It's time to lose the smileys, people.

I'm doing my part to stop the spread of these punctuation mutants. I am making the following graphic available to all those who feel the same way. It is the "emotigone" symbol, and you may use it freely on your Web pages, within your e-mails, and pasted on the top of your monitors. This symbol proclaims that we proudly compose our digital scrawl in plain English, without the crutch of cute jargon.

We know how to write, dammit, and we're proud of it!

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