NooOoOOOOoOOooO! 
cries
thats my answer to that.
Doing that would probably mean that no one would understand anyone
Obviously when he wrote that, he had forgotten this emoticon.
How can the world continue to turn without it? Hmmm?
I’ll forgive him for his short-sightedness this time.
A smilie protest for being made redundent for a week
:…: :doublegrin: :…: 
:…: tupid: :…:
Viven los emoticonos !!!
hmm, I seem to be alone on my point of view:
Down With Smilies!
Thank you for your patience. Enjoy the rest of your life.
I don’t agree with that. Written text doesn’t have the same advantages of spoken dialog, in that the person can’t make use of varying tones or body-language to indicate the nature of the remark. In spoken word, you can easily tell if someone is being sarcastic, or downright insulting. Since this distinction is unapparent in written text, we need to depend on smilies, actions, and general formatting to portray the correct meaning. Without a winking smilie, for example, a statement like: “You’re such a fool” could easily be misinterpreted, and taken with offense. Therefore, it has nothing to do with “having to actually read the text”.
Need another example? Compare the following:
-
Don’t get cheeky with me, or I’ll burn your house down!
-
Laughs Don’t get cheeky with me, or I’ll burn your house down!
Long live smilies! 
Yes, and that’s the scary thing about emoticons. They’re nice, but we should be able to understand each other without them.
It wasn’t so hard in the pre-Internet days, with everyone writing normal letters.
But it has much to do with having to understand its meaning. With emoticons, we don’t have to think. It’s something like telling a joke and then explaining it.
Smilies leading 7:1 so far…
The difference between letters and internet is a big one.
Letters you tend to only write to people you know, these people know you and are more likely to correctly interpret what you meant and in what context.
Internet you are sending it to people who don’t know you and never met you. Which means that people will interpret what you say to match their personality and their reprisentation of you in their mind. This is where the problems lie.
When i talk to my friends on msgr i don’t use as many smilies or “hehe’s lols etc” than when i’m talking to people i don’t know as well. Even so i have still gotten into arguements because even my closest friends mis-interpreted. (never had that from letters though)
— i’m actually going to give you an example now using your Grizzled’s post.
Comes off as Insincere purely because of the following part.
With no real indication of your intended meaning this sentance comes off as mildly abusive, Insincere in a kind of “screw you enjoy your life” way.
While i doubt/hope that was you intent it can easily be intepreted that way. A simple would give it a friendly feel, where as 
would give it a more solid negative meaning like the one i meantioned.
I think Another part of the problem could be that on the internet as opposed to a letter you don’t tend to go into as much detail as to who you feel about the topic - where as in a letter you would so if a sentance is a little 50/50 on it’s meaning you can go by the rest of the letter to fill in it’s intended meaning.
[color=blue]]edit// i forgot to add another BIG plus for emoticons. Multi-cultural use. Here we have people from many places, many from english speaking countries - austrailia, UK, america and then Nederlands, norway, sweeden etc.
All these countries express them selves in language differently be it text or spoken word. This can easily lead to mis-interpretation particularly if someone is posting in a language that is not their first language. If have often been confused talking to german and french people (speaking in english) and it’s been the emoticon that has helped me translate what they meant and how they meant it. This is even common in the same country, people from different states/counties/providences will express themselves differently to some degree.
While emoticons aren’t neccessary, they are very useful.[/color]
no, I was not intending to be negative/abusive. I recognise the points mentioned as valid, in fact, there are some excellent arguments for smilies.
I do not, or rarely use smilies, unless, for the reason that was mentioned above, I am insinuating that something is sarcastic. My reasoning for this comes from the fact that I strongly dislike ‘internet slang’ such as ‘lol’ ‘rotflmao’ and such. I may sound like an (old person?), but it is destroying the language, and people need to know how to communicate to one another (better {for lack of a better term})
Upon further reflection, I realize that I don’t mind smilies as an aid for comprehension, but rather, when they are used to the extent that there is one in every sentence. many of the smilies can: easily be expressed as text, or are completely useless i.e. the ‘help’ one, most of the moving ones, the question one (a question mark would suffice. A
Anyways, if I have offended anyone, I apologise, and If I’ve talked too much, I also apologise.
I think that a long text that has smilies is more fun to read
grizzled i have a question for you.
you say you don’t like the use of internet slang like “lol” but is it really slang or is it just an abreviation?
When speaking people often use abv. eg: AKA instead of “also known as” or in documents EG: instead of exempli gratia / for exmaple.
Do you find this as anoying or do you see that differently and if so could you try and explain it?
In a way it isn’t really distroying the language as it is becomming this generations language. Each generation has it’s own variation and this i think will always continune, though at the same time there is a feeling of wanting to preserve our own version of our language. To add onto that the communication is just fine (even if forced to not use emoticons) for people of the younger generation, where as people like ourselves who prefer the use of proper english (even though i can’t spell it ) can sometimes find it anoying or even miss the point.
Being that i am pretty much half way between the generations beign early 20s it’s easy enough to converse with people in either form and i tend to mimick their prefered communicative interactions as it is just easier to do so.
As an avid reader this i think gives me a more loyal stance on true english and one thing that internet language (for want of a better term) will never truely be able to do (and i feel that you were hinting at it in a way with the comminicating part) is set/create and maintain atmosphere that english can achieve.
allright, I’ll try not to sound like an idiot.
1.) I’ll admit that ‘lol’ is similar to abbriviations, (which I don’t mind; I can’t identify a stark difference between them, you got me on that one.) I just don’t like ‘lol’ for some reason. For the longer ones though (I won’t bother to list, I’m sure you know of them) it is out of pure laziness that people use them, and that, (in my opinion) is one of the greatest threats facing society today; technology has allowed for, people to become much more lazy, not only physically, but mentally as well; it is now completely socially acceptable to be a complete lazy-ass, whereas a while ago people were expected to be much more involved and active (I’m assuming here, because I am only 16 and have only the back in my day, we … cliche as a (refrence?)
I’ll admit that you make a much better argument than me, but I cannot help but feel an aversion to the ‘internet language’ as you put it. The reason I treat it differently than any other language fad is because of the fact that the internet is a frighteningly powerful tool, and this new internet language has become more (prominant?) than any other.
I think I’ve responded to all your points, if I haven’t then please let me know. I apologise for the way I’ve written this, with the brackets and all, this is because I just write as it comes out of my mind. I also realize that I’ve typed waayyy to much, and I will now stop.
I don’t know about that. Emoticons, to my way of thinking, are just a means to portray a very significant part of the message – the tone and emotion. When engaged in a verbal conversation, you can see when the person you’re listening to is smiling, and you can see when they’re frowning. This is a very, very important part of the message, and without it, you’d have much less of an idea about how to interpret whatever they’re saying. Even on the phone, you can hear it in their voice when they’re making a light-hearted remark, or a stern, humorless comment. Since the beginning of verbal communication, we’ve known that body-language plays a profound role in getting the right message across.
In written text, we don’t have this utterly essential service available to us, so we compromise by allowing the author to signify the intent of the message by using the appropriate emoticon, or by including a limited representation of the body-language they would be expressing in an action comment (often between asterisks, such as grins sheepishly). By claiming that these symbols are destroying the English language, you’re entirely missing the point of them in the first place. They may seem a useless novelty to some, but they really are a vital part of converting verbal communication to a written form.
I make a lot of cynical remarks, because that’s just the type of humor that I have. If not for smilies, it wouldn’t matter how much effort I put into the wording my messages, they would still seem rather bitter. So I add a winking smilie, and suddenly people can detect that I’m only kidding. Just as if I was making the joke in real life, I’d be smiling, so my audience knew that I was only kidding. Besides, it’s easier to add a smilie to the end of a line than write “Just kidding” all the time. I don’t want to belittle readers by constantly instructing them how to interpret my remarks, so I use emoticons to represent the tone of the particular line or comment. It’s merely compensation for them being unable to see the expression on my face while I was writing the line.
However, I do strongly agree that internet slang is a horrible and detrimental problem facing the otherwise competent English language. Not so much the frequently-used symbolic terms such as “LOL”, which are used to express when the person has found something humorous (in fewer words), but in particular the slaughter of existing words under the lazy hand of today’s society. It must be appreciated that languages exist as a way of allowing people to communicate ideas and concepts to each other, and is achieved by employing a persistent convention for writing words. Often you’ll see people replacing words with phonetically similar equivalents which are shorter to type, such as ‘u’ instead of ‘you’, ‘r’ instead of ‘are’, and ‘4’ instead of ‘for’. It may seem a convenient way to write the same message in fewer characters at first, but you have to realize that you’re also presenting the reader with a configuration of letters that may well be very unfamiliar to them.
When someone encounters a sentence like “Those are for you.”, they have no trouble deciphering what it means, because each of those words are familiar to them, and they fit perfectly with their definition of how those words work together in context. But when someone who’s relatively new to the internet sees “those r 4 u”, they’d undoubtedly have to stop for a moment and try to work out what it means. It all makes sense when they read it aloud in their head, but that’s quite an inconvenience. They’ve been taught to recognize words in their full, unabbreviated form, and suddenly it’s like they’re looking at a completely different language. This is compounded by people who are too lazy to capitalize appropriately, so it’s difficult to see where sentences begin and end (given the period is often a single pixel that’s not easy to notice when your eyes are quickly flowing through a paragraph). In short, it takes the average person much longer, and forces them to apply a much more rigorous process of translation to a message that is written without conforming to the useful standards and conventions that together form the English language. Also, typing in this way is bad practice, because it builds a habit into your subconscious that will make it harder to write properly when the situation deserves.
I could go on, but this is turning into an essay.
Summary: Smilies are useful, and don’t encourage laziness. “Net-slang”, or localized customization of a language which is only going to work when it’s universally understood = bad, and will probably have a significant hand in the apocalypse.
[qoute]fact that the internet is a frighteningly powerful tool
[/quote]
Oh i well aware of that. I’ve had my share of problems with it, including a mild addiction with pornography simple because it was so easy to get… was like being a teenager again.
Yes i do the same. Probably why half my posts are pointless drivel
– I had a thought of net slag earlier and i believe it has gotten worse since mobile phones in the UK became so cheap. A few years ago a company brought out a mobile phone that was extremely cheap (possibly free) and it is paid for by top up cards which cost from £5 to £100. depending on how much credit you had.
Must of my friends in the UK used net slang abvs. but didn’t start talking like atheists example until mobile phones became extremely popular. Of course mobiles can send “text messages” but space is limited so people started to abreviate things to same money on numerous texts. Using one laters for words or a collection of letters such as h8, f8, etc. And i think this then carried over onto the internet and quickly caught on. I was only online since 1999 but before mobiles there was alot less slang on the internet than is used today.
So i wouldn’t argue with anyone who was to say that the UK’s “cheap” mobile phone stuff actually cause this. While theres probably more to it than that - that’s who it appears to me. Now approx 95% of the UK is mobile phone crazy even kids in school have them. I personally never got one.
smilies are a replacement for facial expressions. thats why they are practical in their use. being without them means that we cannot be sure what the intent is of a particular sentence. wether it is intended to be positive or negative in meaning is impossible to be sure of by writing alone. with smilies, u can tell.
so umm what facial expressions are those?
The last one must be the one on my face when my computer still isn’t working!
OK, you convinced me that smilies sometimes are necessary to make reader understand something (i. e. in our community, when some of us don’t know English well, and of course don’t know each other well). However, their function can’t be abused. I think it’s good when you can express yourself with smilies as well as without them - otherwise, you’re just addicted.