Smileys Make The Word Go Round
It may have begun with the Smileys. Take these, for example:
:-) good smile
:-( good frown
:-D flaunts pearlies/ has a lot of false teeth to show
:-o shock of a normal sort
:-O shock of a stupid sort/ good yawn
:-p cute raspberry/ plain stupidity
:-d cute picking nose with tongue
@{~ unidentified flora/ internet virus
B-l has major eye problem/ is really blind
^^ a bird/ two really small hills, from a distance
OvO not what you are thinking because it is, in fact, an owl
These used to be the silly doodles young girls scribble beside their signatures, along with an army of pointy, ink-stained hearts that could potentially poke a normal reader’s eye out. The popularity of smileys has escalated so much so that MS XP Word (which I am using to write this article) had, for a few seconds, struggled to alter my text-version smileys into wingding sorts.
Smileys proliferate almost everywhere in the internet. The Smiley is Yahoo Messenger’s mascot, for instance. Chat lingo could not last a day, indeed an hour, without a smiley. The radical permutation of smileys online has almost driven me to strangle it’s creator—or at least, someone, anyone…maybe even that guy in the movie “Forrest Gump”.
I cannot say though that I am not guilty of its use. But I can sure still claim that smileys are being force-fed into my messages. Without my permission, even. Sometimes it is convenient, especially when I’m feeling particularly lazy to have good manners and express myself properly with words. Other times, it can be really frustrating, because how can you possibly put a smile on your message and expect people to just accept that it is the epitome of “Happiness”? Or, for that matter, how can you show that godforsaken smiley on your message if it has a Yellow Face!? Unless, of course, you’ve undergone extensive plastic surgery and artificial skin pigmentation to make you look as yellow as a pineapple.
Smileys mask our individualities, make us more common, delude us into conforming to their picture-perfect stereotypes. When your messages have more smileys than words, I tell you, you ought to start worrying about your mental stability.
For more information on the history of Emoticons or "Smileys", visit
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoticon
(honestly, if you want to have creative smileys, you should visit this)
For more information on P. Pepper and Abernaith, visit
Philosophy of Punctuation
allpoetry.com/list/21725
Other Pseudo-Articles:
Punctuation as an Art Form
allpoetry.com/Column/1489164
The Freedom of Exclamations
allpoetry.com/Column/1489015
The Literal Visual
allpoetry.com/Column/1495087
Any complaints, opinions, Views, or violent reactions towards this pseudo-article?
Please feel free to direct all your malevolence (or praise, which is welcome too) to abernaith via im, as Preppy Pepper a.k.a. P. Pepper a.k.a. A Strange Girl is merely a fictitious character who is sometimes preppy, but usually prefers to act like an idiot.
Adding your comment:
