More than once, Alexis Feldman, the director of the Feldman Realty Group, a commercial real estate company in Manhattan, has been moving forward on a major deal when, she said, “at the 23rd hour, I get an e-mail from the broker saying, ‘Sorry, my client is not interested in the space, too bad we couldn’t make the big bucks’ — then there’s a frown face!”
“I mean, it’s ludicrous,” said Ms. Feldman, 25. “I’m not going to feel better about losing hundreds of thousands of dollars because someone puts a frown face to regretfully inform me.”
Emoticons, she added, should be reserved for use by “naïve tweens on AOL Instant Messenger finding out after-school soccer practice is canceled.”
I've noticed that gays are emoticon-enthusiasts. I wonder if anyone has ever sent the e-mail:
"The test results came back positive. 
eh?"
Kristina Grish, said that she grew so accustomed to making the
symbol (a tongue hanging out) in instant messages at work that it once accidentally popped up, in three dimensions, on a date.
“When the waiter told us the specials,” she recalled, “I made that face — not on purpose of course — because they sounded really drab and uninteresting. And the guy I was out with looked at me like I was insane and said, ‘Did you just make an IM face?’ ”
Tremendous. This is like those people who actually say 'roflmao' (row-ful-mayo) when they want to indicate that something you've said is funny. You know, because laughing is so analog.
Teenagers seemed to easily recognize that the characters 3:-o represented a cow, or that @>–> — symbolized a rose or that ~(_8^(I) stood for Homer Simpson.
It took me eons to figure out the Homer Simpson one just now. I clearly haven't been spending enough time on MySpace.
…Soon there were emoticons for historical figures, like Ronald Reagan: 7:^]
Hey, that's clever!
Wait, why are teenagers referring to Reagan so much that he needs a shortcut? Do other historical figures all have emoticons now? If Hitler had one, do you reckon they'd use the winky eyes?
The Japanese, no strangers to the marketing of cute, devised a smiley which could be read without turning one’s head sideways: {*_*}
You can tell the writer of this article is over 40 because she actually turns her head sideways when she sees an emoticon. I imagine a legion of middle-aged soccer moms reading this article, heads tilted like Saint Bernards, going 'Oooh, I get it! I get it!'
LOL!