Just because lots of people like them doesn’t mean they don’t suck. I’ve often contemplated pitting some people for smiley abuse, especially the people who can’t figure out that posting the big grin smiley after making a non-funny joke doesn’t suddenly make the joke funny, any more than laughing at your own non-funny joke does. If your joke can’t stand on its own then rather than infesting the board with another stupid smiley you should just not post it. The people who do nothing but quote someone else’s post and then stick a smiley after it are almost as bad, about a half a step above posting “LOL.”
I predict that there will be at least two responses to my post, one of someone making a lame joke and posting the big grin smiley and the other someone quoting me and posting the rolleyes. Because some people are so clever that way.
While I confess to a certain nostalgic attachment to the long-lost Bonkie, smilies overall are the tools of weak minds. Fundamentalist boards, for example, are forever using smilies (and do they have a lot of them!) in place of rational argument using cites and evidence. Why bother putting together a cutting and unanswerable riposte to another poster’s thrust when you can simple punctuate, “Ur so dumb!” with a :rolleyes: ?
While I confess to a certain nostalgic attachment to the long-lost Bonkie, smilies overall are the tools of weak minds. Fundamentalist boards, for example, are forever using smilies (and do they have a lot of them!) in place of rational argument using cites and evidence. Why bother putting together a cutting and unanswerable riposte to another poster’s thrust when you can simply punctuate, “Ur so dumb!” with a :rolleyes: ?
I have to admit that I use LOL a lot in other places. It’s become a weird thing because I started out using it ironically but now it’s just easier than saying “ha ha ha.” I’ve just surrendered to it. Everyone I know under the age of 25 uses “lol” so often that to get annoyed by it or try to be above it would cause me constant misery.
I use smilies sometimes but I always feel dirty later. Everyone in my company uses them and so I throw in a lot of “bursts into tears” or “confused” smilies on MSN. Which sucks because then everyone knows how weepy and confused I am. MSN is my big chance to keep my true emotions to myself and there I go spoiling it. So I try to keep it toned down. When I get in a habit it’s hard to stop using them, though.
Let’s not get carried away here. “weak minds”, “a crutch to take the place of clever wiriting”, just an additional way of expressing a thought.
And, usually, the thoughts they stand in for are something like, “you’re a tool”, “you are making way too grand a claim”, “I was just kidding” (which, yes, sometimes you do unfortunately NEED.)
At SDMB, at least, no one is confusing the intellect of the guy who puts together a piece expressing his well-reasoned outrage with the guy who just writes, “higher gas prices = :mad:”. And at places where they are heavily used, usually the person using them is better off using a smiley to convey his point than actually trying to put a few thoughts together.
Or, they’re just tacked on to the end of a piece of writing where nothign more has to be said as another form of punctuation.
If you look through most threads here, there are precious few people who are really allowing smilies to take the place expressing their thoughts.
See, for me “LOL” is harder, because you type both the L and the O with the same finger, so it has to type L, move up, type O, move up, type L. It’s faster for me to type “haha” or “heh” (when the joke’s not quite as funny) because of the alternating-hands thing. Also, I converse online with a lot of 18- through 25-year-olds, and I know of only one person who says LOL. I guess it just depends on what circles you run with.
The only place I ever use “LOL” is in chat when I’m playing online poker, to mock others at the table who use it. Quite useful for initiating tilt in tinier minds. Otherwise I may go “heh” which may to some seem just as bad as LOL but strikes me as being several notches above. At least it’s almost sort of a real word.
That reminds me of a few years ago when I guess I was in the habit of saying “ha” instead of “ha ha ha” or “that is funny” or “Oops I have spit something on the keyboard and now you owe me a new bottle of windex” or whatever it is the intelligencia say, and a girl I used to chat with pointed out that “ha” was unnatural and weird. I’m not sure but she rode my ass about it until I stopped using it. I don’t remember what she used for “ha” but I started to make an effort to say “Ha ha ha” instead of just “ha.”
None of that is related to how I came to accept lol. It’s like in highschool when we used to say “vulva” all the time because it sounds so corny and dumb, then eventually we would just say vulva because it was the quickest and most succinct way to refer to our favorite body part. I started out only saying lol to make fun of people saying lol. Of course that was 5 -10 years ago when most of the people saying lol were clueless and deserving of being mocked. But over time I just stopped caring.
I work with a couple of people who over-use the smilies. They use them so much that when I respond to their emails without any smilies I’m afraid they are going to think I’m mad at them. They also over-use exclaimation marks. I don’t know if they say lol because I don’t kid with them. They are all sisters and the rumor is that they’re born again Christians. Not that there’s anything wrong with that but I don’t think it’s a co-incidence.
It’s either:
A) a close-up of a cyclops walrus.
B) a full-frontal body shot of an armless, bald woman with extremely saggy breasts (one moreso than the other).
C) a rear shot of someone dropping trou.
Smileys never substitute for reasoned argument. But not everything around here is reasoned argument. I find that conveying the feeling behind what I say, whether wryly amused, outraged, finding a witty turn of words hilarious, or whatever, is effectively aided by a choice use of smileys.
That said, they can definitely be overused. But, as with all things, abuse does not preclude proper use.
.
“Bonkie”?