Emoticons

A thread on The Local has my mind spinning today. It is about the Attack of the Killer Smilies. After making some great modifications, the emoticons are now appearing larger than life. It's really nothing in the grand scheme of things, unless you are like me and HATE emoticons.

Participating in forums, one encounters many personalities. Some people are simply incapable of communicating via the written word. I can sympathize with those to an extent. I cannot do anything mathematical. Then again...I do not seek out internet forums which require me to use my mathematical skills (or lack thereof).

Aside from piss poor spelling, nothing drives me nuttier than the abuse of an emoticon. Stupid happy faces littering a forum, an idiotic flaming devil (which one person considers to be a clever signature), a smiley pouring wine (used by another person who is the cyber equivalent of the town drunk) are among the things that make me spit nails. Not only is the "abusage" pedantic, it gobbles up bandwidth and it insults my intelligence.

Long and short of it all...if you're that stupid that you need to support your words with pictures, stay the phuck off of anything requiring any sort of writing skills. If your words cannot stand alone find another venue in which to play. If I wanted to see "cute" happy faces when reading, I would visit the children's section of the bookstore and grab a copy of Babar and/or Frog & Toad.

It is English, phuckers. And...it is not so hard to learn how to convey a thought in a written fashion, either.