emoticons

[Laurence Horn]

At 9:17 PM +0000 2/2/01, Lynne Murphy wrote:
>I exchange word-processed letters with a friend, and he's taken to use the
>smiley emoticon in what are otherwise fairly expressive and well-edited
>passages of prose.  (Which seems like a step away from the e-mail use and
>into other forms of writing.)  MS-Word, when I type in ":)", automatically
>changes it to a smiley dingbat--I learned this when writing something
>parenthetical about long vowels.

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.

larry

P.S.  Just out of curiosity, I wonder what happens when these emotica
are imported into ascii.  I'll give it a shot here: Roses are red J
but violets are blue L
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