Eats, Shoots & Leaves - Lynne Truss [52]
You will know all about emoticons. Emoticons are the proper name for smileys. And a smiley is, famously, this:
:–)
Forget the idea of selecting the right words in the right order and channelling the reader’s attention by means of artful pointing. Just add the right emoticon to your email and everyone will know what self-expressive effect you thought you kind-of had in mind. Anyone interested in punctuation has a dual reason to feel aggrieved about smileys, because not only are they a paltry substitute for expressing oneself properly; they are also designed by people who evidently thought the punctuation marks on the standard keyboard cried out for an ornamental function. What’s this dot-on-top-of-a-dot thing for? What earthly good is it? Well, if you look at it sideways, it could be a pair of eyes. What’s this curvy thing for? It’s a mouth, look! Hey, I think we’re on to something.
:–(
Now it’s sad!
;–)
It looks like it’s winking!
:–r
It looks like it’s sticking its tongue out! The permutations may be endless:
: ˜/ mixed up!
<:–) dunce!
:–[ pouting!
:–O surprise!
Well, that’s enough. I’ve just spotted a third reason to loathe emoticons, which is that when they pass from fashion (and I do hope they already have), future generations will associate punctuation marks with an outmoded and rather primitive graphic pastime and despise them all the more. “Why do they still have all these keys with things like dots and spots and eyes and mouths and things?” they will grumble. “Nobody does smileys any more.”
Where does this leave people who love the comma and apostrophe? Where can we turn for consolation? Well, it is useful to remember how depressing the forecasts for language used to be, before the internet came along. Thirty years ago we assumed that television was the ultimate enemy of literacy and that, under the onslaught from image and sound, the written word would rapidly die out. Such fears, at least, have been dissipated. With text messaging and emailing becoming such compulsive universal activities, reading and writing are now more a fact of everyday life than they have ever been. The text message may be a vehicle for some worrying verbal shorthand (“CU B4 8?”), yet every time a mobile goes “Beep-beep; beep-beep” annoyingly within earshot on the bus, we should be grateful for a technological miracle that stepped in unexpectedly to save us from a predicted future that couldn’t read at all. As David Crystal writes in his book Language and the Internet (2001), the internet encourages a playful and creative (and continuing) relationship with the written word. “The human linguistic faculty seems to be in good shape,” he concludes. “The arrival of Netspeak is showing us homo loquens at its best.”
Punctuation as we know it, however, is surely in for a rocky time. Before the advent of the internet, our punctuation system was very conservative about admitting new marks; indeed, it held out for decades while a newfangled and rather daft symbol called the “interrobang” (invented in 1962) tried to infiltrate the system, disguised as a question mark on top of an exclamation. The idea was that, when you said, “Where did you get that hat?!” you needed an interrobang to underline the full expression, and it is delightful to note that absolutely nobody was interested in giving it house-room. But I’m sure they will now, once they find out. Anything new is welcome today. People experiment with asterisks to show emphasis (“What a *day* I’ve