From: Clark S. Cox III (clarkcox3@mac.com)
Date: Wed Dec 24 2008 - 13:01:42 CST
On Dec 24, 2008, at 12:37 PM, John Hudson wrote:
> Joó Ádám wrote:
>
>> Punctuation marks are childish. They're also a way for people who
>> can't write well enough to convey their intent and emotions through
>> prose. If you write something inquisitive, I'll answer. If you just
>> state something, putting in a stupid question mark isn't going to
>> make
>> it a question. And if you write something excited or stressful but
>> fail to convey such, using an exclamation mark isn't going to make
>> it excited or stressful.
>
> How stressful?
>
> How stressful!
>
> The syntactical form of English exclamations is usually identical to
> the syntactical form of English questions, so the punctuation marks
> distinguish and tell us how to read them.
Which is exactly the same function served by emoticons. Some things
can take on a very different meaning without them:
"You can go to hell"
"You can go to hell :)"
One of them is a playful, sarcastic jab, while the other is quite
insulting. The emoticon distinguishes and tells us how to read them.
;)
-- Clark S. Cox III clarkcox3@me.com
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