Mother Tongue Annoyances

If you keep up on your information technology news, then you have doubtless heard that Microsoft has been under some pretty harsh criticism for their recent attempts to patent that ineffable Internet mascot, the emoticon. The patent legalese uses verbiage such as "[The patent application] covers selecting pixels to create an emoticon image, assigning a character sequence to these pixels and reconstructing the emoticon after transmission." Sheesh.

Here are some links to provide you with some catch-up knowledge:

Digg.com article LWN.net article ZDnet UK article

Anyhow, this weblog is about Mother Tongue Annoyances, not about technology news proper. To cut to the chase, I am wondering how y'all feel about emoticons. For those of you who follow this weblog, you have undoubtedly noticed that I tend to use them quite extensively (much to some readers' chagrin, I'm sure). However, I am a very ardent and vocal supporter of emoticons, and I will tell you why.

Let's face it: electronic communication methods such as e-mail, Short Message Service (SMS) text messaging, instant messaging, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), Web chat, etc., do not lend themselves very well to conveying the often intricate subtleties of human emotion. I am unable to enumerate how many amends I have had to make to family members, work colleagues (oh, especially work colleagues!), friends, acquaintances, and even near-strangers because my message was misinterpreted by the receiver. Those who know me personally can attest that my sense of humor is as dry as sawdust. We are talkin' D-R-Y. My delivery is so deadpan that you have to either (a) know me very well; or (b) be highly attuned to this brand of humor to know whether I'm joking or serious when I'm in "that" kind of a mood. Unfortunately, neither my mother nor my wife (Paging Dr. Freud! Paging Dr. Freud!) has any appreciation for my ultra-dry wit, and I often land myself in the doghouse when I try to "make a funny" with either of these particular women.

Consequently, at least with regard to my electronic correspondence, I will use emoticons to signal when I make a statement containing humorous intent. In this manner I feel that I have stated "for the record," as it were, that the sentence in question was not intended to be taken seriously. Naturally, my message recipient and I will occasionally become engaged in a semantic argument over such trivialities as whether my emoticon was simply a smoke-and-mirrors attempt to disguise genuine sarcasm, and so forth. How I loathe peeing matches. By the same token, am I "above" them? Absolutely not.