What is a smiley?
It's the symbol created by typing a colon, a dash, and a close
parenthesis. Put these together, and you get...
:-)
Use these when you need to make it clear that you are being ironic. E-mail
is a wonderful medium, as all of us know, but it needs a different sort of
writing style in order to be effective. Because it combines certain
elements of the spontaneous oral mode of delivery with the cold, hard
glare of letter upon luminescent background, for some reason irony cannot
be easily communicated in this medium. In fact, most of the time it
appears more like an insult than a mild joke.
I write this on this occasion because I fear some people may have taken
offense at a one-liner posted today, following a lengthy extract from
another person's message. This one-liner may well appear to be a cold,
hard insult; if the smiley were used at the end of that sentence, it would
have looked like an attempt at humour.
So, please, to avoid confusion: in future, use your smileys liberally, OK?
And while we're on the subject of how to communicate electronically,
please try to avoid something else that was done in the message I've been
referring to: do NOT send to the list a copy of a lengthy message, only to
append a brief one-liner, whether it be 'right on, bro!' or something less
supportive. All this does is waste space, people's time, and creates a
greater chance for the message to be bounced from people's ever-filling
mailboxes. Trust me: a lot of messages get bounced because of mailboxes
that are filled, and sometimes three or four important messages can be
sent in the same space needed to copy and resend a lengthy message to
people who have already received that message. You may not know about
this, but as someone who actually deals with the bounced messages -- list
owners receive list messages that are bounced -- I can assure you that
this wastes time that can be spent more productively.
Now, everybody take a pill, ok? :-)
George the Irascible
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