Em(:O)ticons

Use of emoticons has fascinated me ever since I saw them being used the first time. But after several years now, I really feel I haven’t learnt enough of this language, let alone mastering it. I was never particularly good at using correct punctuations in a sentence, when in school- and chances are, these things would never improve after school! And imagine my misery using them all together-sometimes in conjunction with alphabets (:-D, K or L ? or none of them?)!

I must admit I have been an extremely slow learner and could go no beyond :) and :( for the first year or so (Not that I have improved greatly since then but yes, I have added nominally to the cart).This baffles me greatly. Emoticons being no better than sign languages in written form should be extremely easy to use. Probably cavemen used similar methods to convey messages to fellow cavemen of similar intellectual ability. Don’t you still pity me? I have started being skeptical of my intellect and the ability to “learn things quickly” (or so was my manager’s feedback- now I know how blatantly he lied!)

Anyways, it took me really long to realize that the alphabets actually represented our faces placed horizontally. And still, for some reason, even today, I can’t make out what exact expression of the face most of them correspond to!

I had somewhere read that it takes us about eighteen muscles of the face to smile. And only a painter knows how the slightest strike of the pencil could change expressions on human faces. There is a Wikipedia page named “List of Emoticons” which I frequently need to refer to, to know what emoticon a particular friend used or which emoticon I should use while replying. Believe me, most of the time, I have failed to find an appropriate emoticon that suited my feelings and had to invariably go for a substitute closest to it. Aren’t we oversimplifying our feelings just to save us writing a few words? Wasn't the primitivism- the crudeness in our behaviour- honest expression of our feelings? J