上班族必備軟實力

Emoticons are the little pictures that help express the emotion involved in Internet comments. I don’t like to use them, and I’m not being sarcastic. They make me unhappy.

They arose in the age of the Internet, because emotions can show in your voice and add meaning to words, but it is hard to show feelings in a chat room. Others cannot hear the happy tone of your voice or see your sly, perceptive wink. They cannot see your body language or how often you roll on the floor, laughing.

Emoticons used to be constructed out of punctuation characters, like “:)”, “;)”, or “^_^”. The creator of these characters is unknown, but believed to be attending elementary school somewhere.

Who knows, Chinese may have started out with smiley cat faces and frowns and only afterwards evolved into an intricate written language. It is obvious after all that ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics were just a bunch of emoticons. (This would be a good place for one of those clever winking gifs, or a smiling pharaoh face.)

I usually don’t use emoticons because I want my writing to be well constructed and understandable without gimmicks. Well-written phrases will be readily understandable and the emoticon will be unnecessary (he thought as he smiled to himself with immense self-satisfaction).

Someday people will carry emoticons around with them, and then flash them occasionally at people they are talking to. You will be able to say the most horrible things to people as long as you flash your smiley to let them know that you didn’t mean it. Now, don’t get me started on those finger quotes. [Show a mean face.]

Thank you for reading. I hope that you have many moments of LOL this year. We will have another article in a few weeks.

【作者介紹】

Richard 是一位台灣女婿，在台灣生活15年，喜愛台灣文化，以風趣幽默的文筆，細膩獨特的觀點，介紹在台灣生活的趣事，一起跟著Richard探訪外國人的台灣世界吧！