Sunday, July 29, 2007

I guess I'm a couple of years behind

In today's Times, an apologia for adult emoticon users:
“In a perfect world, we would have time to compose e-mails that made it clear through our language that we are being cheerful and friendly, but we’re doing these things hundreds of times a day under pressure,” said Will Schwalbe, an author of “Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home” (Knopf, 2007), written with David Shipley, the deputy editorial page editor at The New York Times.

Mr. Schwalbe said that he has seen a proliferation of emoticon use by adults in delicate and significant communications. “People who started using them ironically are now using them regularly,” he said. “It’s really in the last couple of years that the emoticon has come of age.”
I still haven't used an emoticon non-ironically. I'm sure it would save me time, but I just can't get past the "dignified as dotting one’s I’s with kitten faces" thing.

By the way, maybe it's just me, but this passage rings false:
But after 25 years of use, emoticons have started to jump off the page and into our spoken language. Even grown men on Wall Street, for example, will weave the term “QQ” (referring to an emoticon that symbolizes two eyes crying) into conversation as a sarcastic way of saying “boo hoo.”
I've never even heard of QQ. And it doesn't even look like two eyes crying. Who are these Wall Street nerds?

4 comments:

Melissa said...

Haha. I was wondering the same thing about the QQ thing. :)

Manfred Mansel said...

i've started using emoticons nonironically; probably within the past year. now i ironically use abbreviations in real-life convo, such as
fyi, brb, ttyl, omg, etc. it's way cooler.

also, i ALMOST got to bitch at you for letting your blog go illegitimate today, but luckily for you blogger marks posts times as when you start, not when you finish ;)

Manfred Mansel said...

also, please note that i snuck a flight of the concords reference into my comments on my post about M.I.A. JUST FOR YOU

Donn said...

Hah, whatever alyse. I finished that post around 11:45. Holy shit, though, your blog was way more legit than mine this weekend. How did this happen?