I’ve noticed that women and girls tend to use more emoticons than men and boys, too. It also seems to me that the emoticons used by women are more likely to be noseless—such as :) as opposed to :-) -- than those used by men, but it’s not like I did stats on this so I’m not very confident about this. So, as a compromise between having people misunderstand my tone and looking too effeminate, I do use emoticons when I need to, but I give them noses.
As for exclamation marks, I used to almost always use ellipses to terminate sentences in contexts where a full stop might sound too formal and no punctuation at all might sound too slovenly (namely, in comments on Facebook, and certain times in text messages), but then I noticed that that looked too wimpy, whereas exclamation marks looked more assertive, so I now use either ellipses or exclamation marks depending on (among other things) my instantaneous level of self-confidence. (I can’t remember noticing any gender difference in the use of punctuation.)
I never thought the smileys with noses were inherently manly, but I do think that smileys without noses result in a cuter face, which may explain that correlation if we assume that cuteness ideals are shared by most people.
These confessions of textual insecurities are enlightening and endearing. =] I had no idea guys worried about this stuff until yesterday. We should do this more often!
I either give a smiley a nose or not, depending on what looks better given the default font that the places uses. I think that on LW “:)”, looks pretty squished-together and hard to even make out, so here I use “:-)” instead.
(It has always struck me as a little weird that nobody else seems to do this—if they use smilies at all, it’s either always with a nose or always noseless. But then, my active vocabulary for emoticons tends to be broader than that of most folks in any case.)
Oh yeah, the ^_^ face looks bad in some of the wider fonts.
I sometimes feel that pull to adopt something as a convention because it seems reasonable to me. But then I realize that it’s not really a convention if no one understands or follows it, and it requires a lot of work to explain and popularize. So I’m always left reminding my own brain of its pointlessness despite its … seeming reasonableness. For (a California-specific) example, I always want to signal left in a left-turn lane to let the people behind me to know that I’m going to U-turn. But I’m probably the only person that does that so people behind me just figure I didn’t turn my signal off or whatever. =/
I think people who regularly talk to you probably pick up on your smiley meanings intuitively; people hopefully don’t regularly drive behind me.
I’ve noticed that women and girls tend to use more emoticons than men and boys, too. It also seems to me that the emoticons used by women are more likely to be noseless—such as :) as opposed to :-) -- than those used by men, but it’s not like I did stats on this so I’m not very confident about this. So, as a compromise between having people misunderstand my tone and looking too effeminate, I do use emoticons when I need to, but I give them noses.
As for exclamation marks, I used to almost always use ellipses to terminate sentences in contexts where a full stop might sound too formal and no punctuation at all might sound too slovenly (namely, in comments on Facebook, and certain times in text messages), but then I noticed that that looked too wimpy, whereas exclamation marks looked more assertive, so I now use either ellipses or exclamation marks depending on (among other things) my instantaneous level of self-confidence. (I can’t remember noticing any gender difference in the use of punctuation.)
I never thought the smileys with noses were inherently manly, but I do think that smileys without noses result in a cuter face, which may explain that correlation if we assume that cuteness ideals are shared by most people.
These confessions of textual insecurities are enlightening and endearing. =] I had no idea guys worried about this stuff until yesterday. We should do this more often!
When I use a smiley, it’s noseless, but it’s because I don’t think the hyphen adds information. How geeky!
I use smileys with a nose, but that’s probably just because I’m old, and that’s how I first learned them. :-)
I either give a smiley a nose or not, depending on what looks better given the default font that the places uses. I think that on LW “:)”, looks pretty squished-together and hard to even make out, so here I use “:-)” instead.
(It has always struck me as a little weird that nobody else seems to do this—if they use smilies at all, it’s either always with a nose or always noseless. But then, my active vocabulary for emoticons tends to be broader than that of most folks in any case.)
Oh yeah, the ^_^ face looks bad in some of the wider fonts.
I sometimes feel that pull to adopt something as a convention because it seems reasonable to me. But then I realize that it’s not really a convention if no one understands or follows it, and it requires a lot of work to explain and popularize. So I’m always left reminding my own brain of its pointlessness despite its … seeming reasonableness. For (a California-specific) example, I always want to signal left in a left-turn lane to let the people behind me to know that I’m going to U-turn. But I’m probably the only person that does that so people behind me just figure I didn’t turn my signal off or whatever. =/
I think people who regularly talk to you probably pick up on your smiley meanings intuitively; people hopefully don’t regularly drive behind me.