The only post that might not have context is the first one–and really, any utterance, no matter how short, is contextualized in one way or another, in the larger scope of culture. Cross-talk will naturally occur on a regular basis, and people are continually clarifying themselves as discourse normally unfolds. I use smilies as often as I use winks in face-to-face interaction.
And I’m a professional writer, too. So there.
Oh, wait…for your benefit: 
To be honest, a professional writer should write “used to hear”, not “use to hear”, unless he is referring to a hearing aid or something. (Sorry for the pedantry.)
Do you never smile, frown, raise your eyebrows, or change the inflection of your voice in face-to-face interaction?:dubious:
Yep, that was a typo of the sort that spell checker doesn’t catch. Mea culpa.
In other words, we’re arguing semantics. I don’t think something is necessarily not text just because it happens to be a graphic. The point is, a smiley is just a graphical representation of text used to make it more clear. (We use instead of :P, for example.) Since it is being used in a similar manner as text, I say it should be able to be struck out, like text. You obviously disagree.
Of course. But that’s a parallel channel, and spoken discourse is an entirely different form of communication: it’s nature, rather than artifice. People have been writing letters for years without the need to put little pictures of faces to make their sentiments clear; writing has developed its own means for that.
And it’s not because there’s suddenly some kind of pressing need to write everything really fast, or that typing became suddenly really hard to do. It’s because people feel that “e-writing” either won’t get or doesn’t require careful reading. The major exception for me is a response which has no words at all–then I would say that a smilie or frown face alone is serving a very useful purpose, exactly like a completely non-verbal response in face-to-face interaction.
But so often in text via message boards etc. smilies too often for me seem like laughing at your own jokes too much, or dotting your "i"s with a heart when you write to someone you have a crush on. I mean really, if you’re going to jump into a message board exchange with a flippant and humorous one-liner, the smilie shouldn’t be necessary. Either it’s funny or it’s not. Cracking an inappropriate joke about someone next to their grave as they’re being buried isn’t funny just because you smile while doing it.
However, if I think that someone is so sensitive that they very likely will be offended despite what I say, I’ll use a smilie–but that’s often just because I sense that they aren’t going to bother to read what I write very carefully. Otherwise I’ll say something like, “no offense intended.”
I can see why they’re used so much: the reality is that message boards and texting are often read very cursorily. Fortunately, there seldom is anything of really great import in the balance. I certainly wouldn’t want to negotiate a million-dollar contract through texting.
Why would this discussion involve hearing aids? 
And thus, “used to hear” would have been correct.
:eek:
:p:o:rolleyes:
It went in one ear [del]…:)…[/del]> and out the other.
It’s parallel, but in an additional sense. We, as humans, have been speaking for thousands of years longer than we’ve been writing. By your logic, speech should be easily, if not perfectly, understandable. And yet every society has evolved facial and hand gestures, voice inflections, and a thousand other little tricks to add context onto spoken language. They are absolutely necessary, too. Tons of research show how often words alone get misinterpreted. Unless you are the one person in six billion, your daily life pounds home how often words are misinterpreted, even with these little signals. If the person being spoken to is a total stranger, the chances for misinterpretation skyrocket.
You keep mentioning text and letters, as if an Internet message board is the equivalent of a series of formal letters. It isn’t. It’s a conversation, captured in text. Worse, it’s a conservation among a group of virtual strangers. As a conversation it needs all the tricks that a normal conversation requires to keep the message from being misinterpreted. Smilies are a brilliant and convenient shorthand for the visual cues that took thousands of years to develop for speech.
You don’t always need them. The longer and more formal your conversation is, the less need you have for visual cues. Same with posts. The problem with posts isn’t that they’re read cursorily, it’s that they are written with the same casual flair that a throwaway line in a conversation carries. It’s inherent in the type of speech, not a flaw on the speaker’s part.
And again, tons of research supports the truism that every written sentence, no matter how formal, is a minefield. Every word, every phrase, every sentence can be misread contrary to the author’s intent. And is, surprisingly frequently.
One other thing. If posting is conversation, a salutation is as much an off-putting and autistic-seeming tic as appending “regards, chucklehead” to each and every line of speech, no matter how short, would be in a group conversation. Very few things would alienate the user more quickly. The eye can probably be trained to skip the lines more easily than the ear, but the fact that salutations drive people, me included, so crazy, by itself probably proves that posting is speech more certainly than any other specific item.
ETA: I’ve left an error for Liberal to parse.
AND MY AXE!
…uh, I mean, and on Iron.
It’s also useful for fundamental constants, like [del]h[/del]
With great respect, it isn’t a semantical argument at all. I don’t disagree with you that a smiley shouldn’t be strike-outable. I don’t really care either way. I’m just saying that a strikec-out character is itself text, just like the character that isn’t stricked out. But a smiley is not text. It just isn’t. That’s not semantics. It’s just a fact. A smiley is a picture, and text commands (like strike-out) just don’t work on pictures. It’s for the same reason that you can’t make a smiley bold. See? Bolded: Regular: Same same.
You’ve obviously never gotten a letter from my grandmother. She wanted to bring the experience of reading one of her letters as close to the experience of her talking to you as possible. Underlines, multi-underlines, wavy underlines, CAPS, varying letter size, exclamation marks (of various shapes and sizes - she wasn’t typing, this was all handwritten), as well as hearts and smiley faces. And drawings of flowers or musical notes from time to time.
This was all going on WAY before the internet, way before computers. It was a sort of writing derided by more formal letter writers, but it was definitely going on. And, really, I could hear her voice almost as if she were in the room, reading one of those things.
The only innovation in emoticons is that they are (or were, where they are icons) built out of punctuation, rather than hand drawn. I remember seeing my first one and thinking ‘how clever’. : )
Although you can just use ħ. (Unicode 0127)
While I don’t care for unnecessary salutations either, I almost never post casually, whether with flair or not. (I have enough real conversation in my life for that.) That kind of posting is what leads to endless threads with people essentially repeating each other over and over, apparently because they just like to post for the sake of it. (Yes, we know that it’s reprehensible that some woman got drunk and killed people by driving the wrong way on the highway, and I’m sure that every one agrees to this. I didn’t expect you to feel otherwise.)
A message board is further from speech than it is closer to it. People put in verbatim quotations non-sequentially, respond to posts that have appeared before many intervening commentaries, and frequently use hyper-links to make their posts meaningful. It simply doesn’t have the spatial-temporal dimensions of speech. In face-to-face communication people use paralinguistic code primarily because they are present. In a message board, you are “present” only if you decide to “speak.”
If a typical thread in this message board were to take place word-for-word as a face-to-face conversation, it would resemble a congregation of lunatics, and not for the content of what people say.
We can’t assume that humans developed facial expressions purely as some way to compensate for the inadequacies of competent verbal communication (though it has obviously come to serve in that capacity to a great extent). Babies use facial expressions to assess their environment long before they have even the slightest capacity for speech. It’s conceivably just as likely that speech evolved as a means of compensating for the inadequacies of non-verbal communication.
In any case, most of the smilies I see around here are more like Austin Powers nudging someone so that they’ll “get it.” But that doesn’t mean they can’t serve a useful purpose in the same way that question marks, exclamation points, italics, all caps, etc. do.
Actually I agree that message board “conversations” are a third form, between prose and speech, with some of the characteristics of each. We’re sitting here watching and participating in the rise of a new form of communication. That’s amazing. And much more fun than the turgid dissertations that will be written on this new form, quoting the most mind-numbing inanities as seminal bits of form distinction and re-emergence.
Look at the dynamics of a large group conversation, though. You will almost never see everyone participating equally. Two or three people will dominate the conversation, with maybe one or two others chiming in. A lone voice might make a passing joke or comment. As participants enter and leave the group, the focus of the conversation will almost always shift, the focus of dominance will also shift, and different sets of people will comment. In a very long conversation, only a few die-hards will end up talking to one another.
But wait. That sounds very much like your belittling description of a thread. I think the similarities are more important than the differences. Posts may be between text and speech, but in the important ways they are similar to speech. As Yllaria noted, writers have been doing this to text since forever. (cf Joseph Andrews. Which also made a better movie than I thought, though nobody saw it.)
Speech is obviously the primary. (Gestures may have come first, but they were made secondary by verbal speech.) Text came from speech. Posts came from text and speech. Twitters came from chuckleheads. It is not a downward reverse-Darwinary devolution, no matter how much it seems to be on some days. (Though not today, apparently.*) Communications always evolves to fit its niche. Animal evolution is never higher or lower, just more or less adaptive. Same with communication. We’ve seen this adaptation to technology since telegraphers learned to tell senders by their “hands,” the unique characteristics of the way they sent code. Computer coders could be similarly recognized a hundred years later.
Posts are remarkable objects. Message boards are remarkable. We are literally (in the literal meaning of literal) talking to one another around the world. We’re have a group conversation, though I don’t know you or anybody else participating, and even though some of us are talking about a completely different subject (a standard trait of large person-to-person conversations), it all becomes part of the same mix, generated by a stray comment, again exactly as personal conversations almost always are.
Man, I just love this stuff.
The place I’ve seen strike-out text used is in updates to things like rules or laws, with the original (or current) text that is to be removed shown using the strike-outs (I think new text is often in italic, with unchanged text shown regular).
By “this board” I can only assume you mean some other board that is not the Straight Dope.
Or some other planet that is not ours.