File under “Icon, emot-”: I am not the bearer of pleasant punc- tuational predictions.
You’re all certainly familiar with the Internet e-babble convention of grouping punctuation to form pictures as if they were Asian pictograms or Egyptian hieroglyphics. Emoticons—those cute punctuation trains—have been around for a number of years. Here a few examples. For the Internet-challenged, tilt your head to the left to “read” the pictures:
:) smiley face
;-) knowing wink
:o wide-mouthed surprise
:0 even greater surprise, or maybe that’s a pig
#-) wasted
{8>(} stuff guy wearing glasses dissatisfied with his big pointy nose, bad toupee and scruff chin whiskers, though of course I made that one up
Now, the bad news, something that won’t make you:) and probably will make you :o or :0 and will certainly convince you that I’m #-) What I’m about to suggest is blasphemy of blasphemies, but this is my fear, and this is my prediction: Some emoticons might find their way into everyday use in decades to come ... to the point of becoming formal punctuation. That will be a long time away, yet remember that language’s many evolutions include that of our punctuation. At one time, we had no punctuation marks at all—and
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today we use a variety of strokes and flyspecks and squiggles that weren’t at all like the early punctuation marks. For a time, for instance, what we call a slash or virgule (/) was used the way commas are used today. (Also see “Comma Faults” on page 172 for more information.)
However, emoticons don’t function as punctuation— yet. Some of these protocharacter combinations could very well crawl out of the sea, develop four legs, and eventually stand on two feet. I don’t mean that we'll see any sort of sentence with a smiley face replacing ellipses, for instance, though the thought intrigues. We have at least two punctuation symbols that signal the sentence’s intent, as opposed to most other symbols, which indicate such concepts as relationships (colons and hyphens, for example), isolation (like the parentheses that surround this phrase), and rhythms (including commas and periods, though their use is far more functional than just establishing rhythm). The two symbols indicating intent are the exclamation point, which helpfully allows us to see the difference between “I’m on fire” and “I’m on fire!,” and the question mark, which signals not only interrogation but also doubt. Doubt? How could that be? —and thus my point.
These two inflectional symbols are often used together. Together, you say?! That’s absurd! In 1962, an advertising exec named Martin K. Speckter suggested in a TYPEtalks Magazine article that the symbols be merged into one symbol, eventually called an inter- robang (the “bang” being printer lingo for “exclamation point”). What?! Merge them?! Not exactly an unprecedented marriage, as evidenced by $, formed by wedding two characters, including the
letter S. (We re not sure which specific letter was superimposed over the S, as there are several theories of the symbol’s origin. However, we do know that Martin K. Speckter did not propose the symbol in MONEYtalks Magazine.) 7 *
So, we find ourselves with already-established symbols that tell us how a sentence is spoken, or that signal the writer’s intent. Doubt, questioning, fury, urgency, astonishment—so why not one that officially signals that all the preceding was a joke?
In other words, I’m not serious :)
I think :0