On Feb 23, 2011, at 1:01 AM, Boris Liberman wrote: > > Now, question is - am I being abusive in this or is this whole idea wrong > from the start? Surely I can stop using any extra-textual mark up whatsoever, > but then I am afraid, the likelihood of being misunderstood or > misunderstanding the other person on my own will be greater.
You aren't being abusive, there are times when they are slightly annoying or distracting. There are times, when being non-standard, they seem to obfuscate more than they clarify. There are generally two schools of thought on the subject. The first one is that people communicated by written word in the English language for many centuries without the use of emoticons. They should not be needed. On the other hand, we have people from a wide variety of cultures, with a wide range of ability in reading and writing of English. A great writer may not need emoticons to let the reader know when they are being sarcastic, but if James Thurber is on PDML, he's in full on lurk mode. Fortunately, most of the people on PDML, when they encounter something that seems like it might be offensive, assume an error in communication and interpret things as if they weren't meant to be offensive. There are a few people that seem to enjoy taking offense at what others say, and my feeling is, fuckem. There are a few fairly standard smilies such as :-) (for a smile) ;-) (for a flirty wink) but even those are not universal. Conservative use of them can convey an emotional subtext in a manner that most people will understand. Over use of them is rather annoying. Your use of /wink/ *guffaw* _stern look_ or whatever is kind of like using lojban, it might convey exactly what you mean, unfortunately nobody else understands it. > Have your say. You can be brutal and honest or you can even do it off the > list. You do a damn sight better in English than I do in either Russian or Hebrew, so I'm certainly wiling to cut you a bit of slack. My off list question was prompted because I could tell that you were trying to clarify rather than confuse, but that, at least for me, it wasn't working. I also applaud your humility in that you're willing to ask about things like this and risk people telling you that you're doing things wrong. -- Larry Colen [email protected] sent from i4est -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
