Thursday, February 13, 2003

This Just In Boy Arrested for Tampering with Grades Reuters - Thu Feb 13,10:25 AM ET:    An 11-year-old Florida schoolboy was arrested and charged with sneaking on to his teacher's computer during a lunch break to change some of his grades, authorities say.   Jedis Become a Force to Be Counted Reuters - Thu Feb 13,10:22 AM ET:  It's official -- "Star Wars" has created almost 400,000 Jedis in Britain. Some People Love to Hate Valentine's Day AP - Thu Feb 13, 1:34 AM ET Valentine's Day is the holiday of love, to be sure. It's also the holiday that many singles — with ever-increasing zest — love to hate. 6:51:10 PM     |

Emote With Care Ever chatted with someone and they start mixing-in a lot of :-)'s or ;-)'s or :-('s or...?  The occasional emoticon is ok, but some people seem to have a burning need to append one on each and every message they send. There's almost a limitless variety of those things.  Way, way, way back when, like say 1999, you had to use your imagination to picture what those emotes represented.  Then along came MSN and Yahoo messengers and those :-)'s came in full color along with a few emotes you never dreamed of using: But there's still a problem.  How do you know exactly what those faces look like on a real person?  Can you accurately imagine how the person you're chatting with looks, assuming they are actually winking at you, or laughing, or blushing at that witty double entendre you managed to tap out on your keyboard?  Luckily some guy has already come to your rescue: Real Life Emoticons For the record:  that's not me. Then you have the people who are acronym crazy.  Every message from them looks like: BTW IM LMAO!!  :-D!!!!!  R U 2???!!  ;-)!!! If you need help deciphering that sort of message, here's a list of common emoticons and acronyms. On a similar note, CNN has story involving text messages and their potential effect on the language.  Read it.  It's how your kids are going to communicate with you someday.  j/k ;-)! 5:23:47 PM     |

© Copyright 2005 Alex L. Mauldin.