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Don't Hide Your Emoticons!You've mastered getting online, and are somewhat comfortable with all that Cyberlingo. So what's the next step in your Cyber education? Research? Reference? Nah -- Smiley Faces! :-) How do you make all those faces, why do you make all those faces, and what do they mean? (:-o) Smileys, or Emoticons (Emotion + Icon) are just a sequence of characters on your keyboard. Since it is difficult to line the standard keyboard characters up vertically, most emoticons are on their side, and so are best viewed by tilting your head to the left. Take a look at the chart of commonly used Emoticons below. The most common, the Smiling Emoticon, is formed by using the colon, the hyphen, and the right parenthesis! Try it! :-) All of these smiley faces seem kind of juvenile, don't they? Well, yes and no. Since E-Mail and chat messages are devoid of the benefit of facial expressions, these Emoticons fill the gap nicely. For example, suppose you sent your employees an E-Mail about the upcoming holidays, and ended it with the line, "In exchange for your generous Christmas bonus, you are all expected to be here by 8:00am on Christmas morning." :-) Funny, right? But how about if you hadn't included that Smiley? Bah-humbug! The following Emoticons were taken from The Unofficial Smiley Dictionary. These are just the tip of the iceberg:
As you can see, the possibilities are limitless! |
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