There has been a lot of discussion about misunderstandings and hurt feelings disrupting the wonderful friendships we share here in the Unicyclist.Community.
I personally get hundreds of PMs a week about this, and people asking whether I think so-and-so was serious when she said blah-blah-blah.
It’s become clear that we could all get along better here if people were required to pass an Emoticon Course before posting here.
Here’s some examples of confusion caused by failure to use emoticons:
First from the Hello! thread:
And from the Unicycle for Christ thread, you can see the deep misunderstanding which arose because James and Spudman failed to use the emoticon when discussing Jesus.
It’s hard to tell whether James and Spudman are joking, yes?
I’ve since learned that Blake signed up for Cathwood’s on-line Social Skills Training Course, and has demonstrated dramatic gains in the use of humor and emoticons.
Hey, awesome idea! It sucks that Jane Austen, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Wodehouse, Dickens, Hardy, Twain, Sartre, and Plato had to write without the max benefits of the emoticon, dudes.
Too true! So many students had found these writers difficult to comprehend until the new Emoticon editions of Shakespeare and the others, selling like hotcakes! Except for Plato, a rather humorless dude who seems beyond help.
The top 6 smilies to your right will be inserted into 1st grade reading books, with the next 6 in 2nd and 3rd grade.
Sarcasm is a developmental marker, which a normal IQ youngster prolly begins to grasp receptively in 5th or 6th grade, but does not begin to use expressively until 7th or 8th grade.
So your enhanced emoticon vocabulary is on the agenda of the School Board for the next meeting, and the publishers are rolling the presses.
If you have a straight face emoticon it sort of ruins the subtlety.
Then again, emoticons ruin the subtlety of pretty much everything. That may have been some kind of irony right there, but I’m not sure enough to call it one way or the other.
emoticon when discussing Jesus.
