You might think I'm one of those people who thinks that emoticons are eroding our ability to use proper English to express ourselves, and while that does sound like something I'd say, I actually like emoticons. Or at least I used to.

Emoticons were far better when they weren't rendered graphically by the stupid chat client. At least when they're text, the emoticons look basically the same to everybody--- there aren't that many readable fonts in the universe that your reader might be using.

But now that every chat client has its own arsenal of badly designed, arbitrary bitmaps that replace the text, who knows what you're communicating when you accidentally type a sequence of punctuation that Trillian has decided to encuten into a winged M&M, or maybe a Face Broom.