<!doctype html public "-//W3C//DTD W3 HTML//EN">
<html><head><style type="text/css"><!--
blockquote, dl, ul, ol, li { margin-top: 0 ; margin-bottom: 0 }
--></style><title>Re: emoticons</title></head><body>
<div>At 9:17 PM +0000 2/2/01, Lynne Murphy wrote:</div>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>I exchange word-processed letters with a
friend, and he's taken to use the<br>
smiley emoticon in what are otherwise fairly expressive and
well-edited<br>
passages of prose. (Which seems like a step away from the
e-mail use and<br>
into other forms of writing.) MS-Word, when I type in
":)", automatically<br>
changes it to a smiley dingbat--I learned this when writing
something</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>parenthetical about long vowels.
</blockquote>
<div><br></div>
<div>Hey, thanks Lynne--that's neat. Learn something new every
day! I suppose it would be annoying if I ever wanted to type a
parenthetical comment ending with a colon, but evidently I haven't
been writing too many papers on long vowels the last few years.
(For others using MSW 98, or perhaps its precursors, on the Mac, and
for all I know for those using MSW on IBM-ish machines as well, it
might be useful to add that this auto-conversion extends to :(, which
turns into a frowny dingbat. Equal time for negative
emotions--I love it! I assume these are the two ur-emotica; at
least I remember feeling very pleased when my instructor annotated my
homework assignments with (right-side-up) smiley faces--way
back before anyone thought that anyone needed a personal computer in
their home, let alone a personal computer with software that
autoshifts a :) 90 degrees clockwise and puts a circle around
it.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>larry</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>P.S. Just out of curiosity, I wonder what happens when
these emotica are imported into ascii. I'll give it a shot
here:<font color="#000000"> Roses are red<font face="Wingdings">
J</font> but violets are blue<font face="Wingdings">
L</font></font></div>
</body>
</html>