[Fwd: Re: Fw: Emoticons/smileys in Word]

[Laurence Horn]

At 4:18 PM -0500 2/4/01, D. Ezra Johnson wrote:
>>>here you can delete :) = <smiley face>, or any other
>>>auto-formatting or auto-text features (like the automatic >>replacement of
>>>"To whom it may concern:" with "Dear Sir or >>Madam:").
>>
>>Does it *really* do this last?
>>
>No, but it does activate the highly annoying animated "Letter Wizard".

Yes, a little of the Letter Wizard goes a long way.

>
>To my mind, more troubling than the replacement of :) by a true smiley is
>the replacement of lowercase i by capital I, even when enclosed in brackets
>as a phonetic symbol.

Not a plausible source of sound change, to be sure.  (Although maybe
that's what STARTED to happen in Pittsburgh, and they didn't notice
what was going down until it had gotten to the /__{g,l} environment,
whence the Iggles and Stillers of gridiron fame.)

>  This one can't be fixed by a backspace, since it
>doesn't appear until a forward space. You have to fool it by typing [ii] or
>something, and then going back and removing one of the characters.
>
True enough, but it's also quite easy to delete this preference from
the AutoCorrect list under Tools as mentioned earlier, and then one's
high vowels can remain so.  (Works for the Mac version anyway.)

larry