Reply interspersed. On 2/23/2011 7:49 PM, Larry Colen wrote:
You aren't being abusive, there are times when they are slightly annoying or distracting. There are times, when being non-standard, they seem to obfuscate more than they clarify. There are generally two schools of thought on the subject. The first one is that people communicated by written word in the English language for many centuries without the use of emoticons. They should not be needed. On the other hand, we have people from a wide variety of cultures, with a wide range of ability in reading and writing of English. A great writer may not need emoticons to let the reader know when they are being sarcastic, but if James Thurber is on PDML, he's in full on lurk mode.
Well, I cannot be clear and not annoying or distracting at all times. This is mathematically improbable.
Fortunately, most of the people on PDML, when they encounter something that seems like it might be offensive, assume an error in communication and interpret things as if they weren't meant to be offensive. There are a few people that seem to enjoy taking offense at what others say, and my feeling is, fuckem.
Right. But shouldn't we try to be mindful of what we write and thus strive to avoid unpleasant situations?
There are a few fairly standard smilies such as :-) (for a smile) ;-) (for a flirty wink) but even those are not universal. Conservative use of them can convey an emotional subtext in a manner that most people will understand. Over use of them is rather annoying. Your use of /wink/ *guffaw* _stern look_ or whatever is kind of like using lojban, it might convey exactly what you mean, unfortunately nobody else understands it.
There you go, Larry. I am on the internet since 1992. And it is the first time that I am told that ;-) is in fact a flirty wink and not just a wink. That's the whole point behind my decision to use words to describe my non-verbal communication (yes, I realize that above sentence sounds like moron-oxide (there is a joke in here too)) instead of symbols.
You do a damn sight better in English than I do in either Russian or Hebrew, so I'm certainly wiling to cut you a bit of slack. My off list question was prompted because I could tell that you were trying to clarify rather than confuse, but that, at least for me, it wasn't working.
I see. It is just that your question was valid and it made me think that "help of club" was in order.
I also applaud your humility in that you're willing to ask about things like this and risk people telling you that you're doing things wrong.
Thank you. It is rather special bunch of people that I am asking here. Boris -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
