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November
27th Joke and Trivia
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| Like prehistoric cave dwellers, the devotees of electronic
bulletin-boards and "e-mail" have struggled to find
a new way to express themselves. Wall painting would not work.
Words, it seems, are not enough. Inarticulate sounds cannot
be displayed on screens. To make their messages feel more like
personal contact, they have hit on using the punctuation marks
on an ordinary keyboard in order to pull faces at each other.
To read these signs, you have to put your head on your left
shoulder.
The basic unit is:
:-)
the "smiley", a standard smiling face. In context,
this can mean "I'm happy to hear from you", or other
pleasantries. The smiley can also wink:
;-)
or frown:
:-(
among other things. The language can express many things about
the user's appearance:
8-) :-{) 8:-) :-)-8 :-Q @:-)
These signs mean, respectively, that the user wears sunglasses,
has a moustache, is a little girl, is a big girl, smokes, wears
a turban. The smiley can also indicate some subtleties of mood
and response:
:-D :-/ :-e :-7 :-X
These mean that he is laughing, is skeptical, is disappointed,
is wry, is keeping his lips sealed.
Many of the signs (perhaps the majority in use on America's
biggest computer networks) are simply absurd fun, verging
on the unintelligible:
:-F *:o) +-:-) @=
C=}>;{))
The user is a buck-toothed vampire with one tooth missing, is
a clown, holds religious office, is pro-nuclear. The hieroglyph
on the next line means that the user is a drunk, devilish chef
with a toupee in an updraft, a moustache and a double chin.
Now you know what electronic mail is used for.
People
forget how fast you did a job
- but they remember how well you did it.
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