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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. |
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.The other day I was chatting with someone and typed " :P " to express a thpppt-face of discontent.
They were very confused, and our conversation became a "why did you say that?" "say what?" until it came out that in their chat software, colon-P is rendered as a MUG OF FROTHY BEER.
That's just silly.
Posted by: Jay at September 14, 2005 07:45 AMI think there's two aspects to the phenomenon you described. The first is the unpredictable translation/ambiguous graphic thing that in the short term impedes communication, especially for curmudgeons.
The second is that technology is accelerating change in language, by producing cultural artifacts like "w00t", images embedded into text like retardicons, or spelling changes brought on by interface limitations like l33t speak. Whether or not this is producing gains or losses in our ability to communicate is questionable. Scot's blog had a related thread:
http://www.happyinwater.com/life/archives/2005/09/02/wikipedia-integration-with-trillian/#comments
Anyway, I love teh word "encuten". Carry on, curmudgeon!
Posted by: frisbeememex at September 15, 2005 10:09 AM