I have a problem. An addiction, even. It started off slow, tentatively with slight trepidation, and then it became a habit. It was so easy to get into and since everybody is doing it, it just felt right. I’m an emoticon addict and I’m trying to quit.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It was during the AOL days \u2014 or maybe IRC \u2014 that I started implementing real dedication with my punctuation abuse. Sure, I’ve always been pretty fuzzy on my usage of a comma, an apostrophe, hyphens or semi-colons; in the end, that fuzziness is merely an excuse justifying the abuse.<\/p>\n
No longer did I have to structure sentences, or insert pauses, or even establish rhythm. Exclamation marks became a thing of the past! I had free reign in being nasty by merely putting my enemies hot-words in “quotes” and then smooth things over with a virtual hand-on-the-shoulder. All I had to do was say what I wanted to say with whichever words I wanted to use and ignoring any sort of punctuation in between while allowing my sentences to ramble on and then finally and breathlessly end the thing with a self-deprecating and highly appreciated emoticon smiley ; )<\/strong><\/p>\n Every single thing I said before the emoticon changed, as if by magic, into something fabulously funny or horrendously sad. : (<\/strong> Crushed by the very weight of my punctuation-less words and, in a very ho-hum sort of way, musing about it isn’t enough: the emoticon explains it all. Poor me.\u00a0 :-\\<\/strong><\/p>\n So, I’ve admitted my problem; I don’t think there’s any easy way to get over it. Virtual communication has relegated all of those buttons on the right hand of the \u00a0keyboard (those brackets and slashes and smiley-eyes) to the archaic world of hieroglyphics\u2014what will typographers do.<\/p>\n I’m hoping to stave my use of the emoticon with punctuation marks. Maybe if the things were replaced with graphics, like actual smiley icons, it wouldn’t be that bad; but as it is, I don’t have much of a choice. I’ll have to use more words and maybe, hopefully, people will get that my tongue is firmly planted in my cheek without me having to prove it with emoticons. :-P<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have a problem. An addiction, even. It started off slow, tentatively with slight trepidation, and then it became a habit. It was so easy to get into and since everybody is doing it, it just felt right. I’m an emoticon addict and I’m trying to quit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,12],"tags":[76,286,218,287],"class_list":["post-789","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rants","category-story","tag-blogs","tag-emoticons","tag-internet","tag-words"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rreynoso.com\/reysapoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/789","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rreynoso.com\/reysapoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rreynoso.com\/reysapoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rreynoso.com\/reysapoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rreynoso.com\/reysapoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=789"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/rreynoso.com\/reysapoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/789\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":792,"href":"http:\/\/rreynoso.com\/reysapoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/789\/revisions\/792"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rreynoso.com\/reysapoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=789"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rreynoso.com\/reysapoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=789"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rreynoso.com\/reysapoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=789"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}