Simmer Down and Lighten Up
by Karen Williams | July 05, 2007 - Seminole Chronicle
Some people can't find enough to complain about. They scream to exhaustion about the price at the pump, the idiocy of government, the volatility of Mother Nature, and the fact that Billy Ray Cyrus was kicked off "Dancing with the Stars."
Now they've found another target for criticism - the innocent and defenseless emoticons.
And the emoticons, in their chipper and selfless way, probably shrug it off. "While they're picking on us, they're leaving someone else alone," they assert stoically.
The term "emoticon" is short for "emotional icon." No, this is not a weeping religious statue. Rather, it's the use of punctuation marks to create little faces in emails. Emoticons are usually designed to be viewed on their side. Thus : -) is a happy face, while :-( is a frowning face and ;-) conveys a wink for "just kidding." Then there's :-o to communicate surprise or shock and 8-) is a happy face wearing glasses.
But one grumpy editor, writing for Inc. magazine, has no use for emoticons.
"... emoticons bug the [heck] out of me," bellows Sally Swift (not her real name, thank heavens). "I hate the way they reduce the gloriously complex geography of human faces to a few crude lines and dots. I also resent their imputations of insensitivity. 'I assume you lack the emotional intelligence to infer my attitude from mere words,' the little buggers seem to say, 'so I will help you with a device comprehensible to two-year-olds.'"
Editor Swift shudders to see emoticons popping up in business correspondence. "What does it say about a company," she chides, "when employees pepper their e-mail with the sort of juvenile glyphs common in MySpace chats?"
This is no doubt the same angry woman whom I once caught scraping a big, yellow happy face sticker off my bumper in a parking lot.
What will Ms. Swift bash next? The thumbs-up gesture? The call-me gesture? The hit-knuckles handshake?
I, for one, enjoy the emoticons, and I both salt and pepper my emails with these droll bits of humanity. The emoticons remind us we're more than our electronic words. We're creatures of joy, sadness, ironic winks and bad eyesight. Sometimes we even put our money where our mouth is :-$ or wear lipstick :-{} or come from an Ivy League school :<)
And if the emoticons delight some of us simpletons, the smileys can render us ecstatic.
Smiley Central is a computer program that allows access to thousands of small, colorful, animated pictures to illustrate your email. Categories range from pets to sports, love to weather, entertainment to the world. The latter category offers tiny pictures of famous sites. (Who, may I ask, could resist a yellow smiley face with a British flag who pops out of Big Ben like a cuckoo?)
This adorable bunch includes mermaid smileys, chef smileys, viking smileys, gladiator smileys, ballerina smileys, and meditating/levitating smileys - even smileys with (uh-oh) flatulence.
The "happy" category alone at Smiley Central offers more than 50 exuberant faces - jumping, bouncing, wearing shades, wearing sneakers, playing peek-a-boo.
It would be enough to make Editor Swift curse the computer age. But as I see it, if you're too busy or jaded for Smileys, well, you need to slow down, lighten up, and do something fun, like a Tarzan call.
And find something worthwhile to complain about, such as the price of gasoline. You can surely get more mileage out of that.
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Copyright 2007, Karen Williams
