Emoticons (minicast)

Welcome to another summer minicast from A Way with Words.

This week we’ve got a call about smileys or emoticons.

You know, that’s in an email when you use a colon and a capital letter P to make a sideways face sticking out its tongue.

Bleh.

Well, Michael called us wanting to know, first of all, if there was a name on the order of noun, verb, adjective, and so forth

That would apply to emoticons used as language.

But he also wanted to know, how in the world do you punctuate them when you put them at the end of a sentence?

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, Martha. Hello, Grant. This is Michael from Oklahoma City.

Well, hello, Michael in Oklahoma City.

What I called about today was, in relation to emoticons,

I had a thing while I was in school a couple of years ago

Where my friend and I started sort of talking about what emoticons were

And how they would be used.

And so we kind of got into a debate as to whether or not emoticons should be used as words

And then punctuated afterwards, like if it comes at the end of a sentence,

Or if they replace the punctuation.

So I came up with the concept that I think it’s kind of like a punctuation,

You know, just like a question mark or an exclamation point might be.

So that prompted me to call you.

First, I think you’re asking, what do they have a part of speech, right?

Right. Are emoticons either words or are they punctuation or are they neither in something totally brand new?

Emoticons being those little compositions of punctuation marks that are made to look like little pictures, right?

Right.

For example, you put a colon and a closed parentheses,

And you have a little smiley face if you look at it sideways.

You have two eyes and a curved up mouth.

Emoticons, therefore, are neither.

They’re not words, and they’re not punctuation.

And they may be made of punctuation in the same way that a word is made of letters.

But they’re actually probably best called logograms,

Which is the same word that you would use for many Chinese characters.

Okay.

Logograms.

Yeah, so they’re pictures that mean something.

So now the question is, if you’ve got that at the end of the sentence, does the punctuation come after?

If you’re using the regular emoticon where it’s a colon and then a closed parentheses,

And you happen to have that in a parenthetical phrase that you have a parentheses around anyway,

And you’ve got that inside, so do you do another parentheses after that

And make it look like a double-chinned smiley face?

I know exactly what you’re talking about, and I usually don’t.

I use one parentheses there to both close the open parentheses that encloses the phrase and to serve as the mouth in the emoticon.

But I guess the point is that we haven’t standardized this by any means, right?

Well, we haven’t standardized it, but consensus has developed that that is the way that it’s done.

Has it?

Look at acronyms.

Let’s just forget emoticons for a second and look at some of the online acronyms.

You will find almost all the time that when LOL is used, it is used as if it were a sentence itself or at the end of a sentence.

So I’ll make a comment about her hair is spiky red and dorky, and then I’ll put LOL, period.

So it actually is inserted there.

And what we’re doing with these, we’re not really replacing punctuation.

We’re not actually replacing any other part of speech.

We’re doing what’s called paralinguistic restitution.

Paralinguistic restitution.

Yes. If you break that phrase down, you’ll understand what it means.

We’re adding back into our written text the things that we can do with our mouths, the things that we can say aloud.

So we add in a little smiley face to indicate that if we were speaking those words, we’d be indicating happiness or some kind of cheer.

Oh, my God. I feel like Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker.

It has a name, Helen. It has a name.

No, yeah. Paralinguistic restitution. Just remember that phrase.

And then think about that when you’re writing because that’s what you’re doing.

I had no idea.

We instinctively recognize that the written text isn’t doing 100% of the job that we want it to do.

So we find ways to make it do the things we want to do.

There are simpler forms of this.

Sometimes they’re called cue surrogates.

When you speak to somebody face-to-face and you’re speaking to them emphatically, Michael,

Let’s say that you’re angry with them.

You might poke your finger at them, right?

Poke your finger.

You might even jab them in the chest.

Well, that’s not any kind of speech.

Yet that finger doing that indicates anger and energy and emotion.

You’re adding an cue to your speech.

Smiles are the same thing.

Frowns are the same thing.

Shouting, speaking in whispers.

In text, we do that by putting in all capital letters.

That’s shouting.

Everybody knows that that’s shouting.

Well, most people know that that’s shouting in text.

Every once in a while, you have to remind somebody.

These are logograms that are adding back into the text things that are missing that we can do in spoken language that are difficult to do in written language.

Well, that makes a lot of sense.

See, I knew you would know the answer.

No, it has a name.

But here’s a question for you two.

Do you think we really need emoticons?

A friend of mine and I covenanted that we would never use emoticons in email

Because we feel like our language should be able to do that function even in email.

No, and I’ll give you an example of why I think that they’re important.

I’ve had email conversations with a person from my work who has a very dry sense of humor.

And so when they would send me an email, oftentimes they would be utilizing their dry sense of humor,

And I didn’t get the joke.

And I didn’t get the joke because, of course, I wasn’t, like Grant was saying,

There’s a verbal clue that you get while you’re speaking to somebody face-to-face.

That you can’t get when you’re getting something by email

Because you’re getting it at a totally different time

And you’re in a totally different place,

So therefore you’re not necessarily in that conversation.

In those instances, an emoticon would have made me understand better

What my coworker was trying to say or the fact that they were being funny.

So you’re saying it is a unit of meaning then.

Right. It does have a unit of meaning.

And I think that as more and more communication is less verbal in a written format on the computer or whatever,

I think that those images or those emoticons are going to be important because, again,

They fill that little need that the written word itself can’t do completely.

Well, Martha, I understand that your covenant, I understand exactly what your covenant’s about.

Your covenant says if you are a sufficiently good writer.

Right. We’re both writers, yeah.

Yeah, then you should be able to do this job without adding anything fancy.

Right. Am I going to start seeing emoticons in magazines now?

But the difficulty I have with this argument, and this is an argument that I used to hold as well.

I used to believe that as well, and then I dropped it.

Really?

I mean, I’ve been on the Internet since 1992, and I didn’t use emoticons or any of that kind of language until like the last four or five years.

And I came around because I realized to write well actually takes more time than email requires.

Writing well actually is more time-consuming than not writing well because you have to go back and do draft and redraft and work on those subtleties to make sure that your message is completely understood.

I could instead, if I wanted to indicate somebody that I was joking, put a semicolon, which is a wink, and a close parentheses, which is a smile, to indicate that the whole thing was a joke or sarcastic or that I was somehow teasing.

And immediately, just the two characters, I could change the tone of a thousand words with just two keystrokes.

And I think that’s so valuable when it comes to email because I’m not writing for the ages.

I’m not writing for the masses.

It’s usually a one-on-one conversation.

As long as you know your audience, I think you’re fine.

Well, Michael, you and Grant have made a pretty good case here for that, I think.

So where did we decide to put the period?

I would always put it on the outside.

On the outside of the emoticon?

Yeah.

It’s part of the sentence.

Really?

Unless you put it on its own line.

It’s its own paragraph.

And, Michael, what do you do?

I think that that’s pretty much what I do.

Just instinctively.

Although initially I was thinking that I was going to try to create them as a punctuation,

But I think Grant is swaying me.

Sometimes I do put them on the outside.

If they’re on their own and they don’t belong to a particular sentence,

Then it’s perfectly fine to just hang them out there with no punctuation at all.

Like if you were to say, you know, Led Zeppelin is a rockin’ band, period, smiley face,

There’s no period necessary after the smiley face.

It’s not a complete sentence.

Right.

In that case, it’s standing on its own, but it doesn’t require a full period, like you said.

Absolutely. Thank you for your call, sir.

Stay tuned.

Thank you.

All right. Thanks, Michael.

Bye-bye.

We’d love to hear how you punctuate emoticons.

Even better, tell us how you pronounce them when you’re reading text aloud.

Victor Borga has left this world, or else we would ask him.

Let us know on our website at waywordradio.org or call us at 1-877-Wayword.

That’s 1-877-929-9673.

Of course, we’ll always take your emails at words@waywordradio.org.

And that’s all for this summer minicast.

You can hear past shows for free on our website, as well as talk with other listeners about our topics.

For A Way with Words, I’m Grant Barrett.

Support for A Way with Words comes from WordSmart, the vocabulary building software.

Improving your vocabulary, reading comprehension, and critical thinking skills will increase your chances for success.

Learn more online at WordSmart.tv.

And from iUniverse, supported self-publishing.

Is there a book in you?

Find out how to publish it at 1-800-AUTHORS

Or learn more online at iUniverse.com.