Thanks Microsoft

As i trawl through my dissertation i thought i’d share with you something nice i noticed:

Microsoft Word lets you click on the save shortcut icon (the now obsolete floppy disk) even when there’s nothing to save. When you save a document normally a progress bar can be observed to flash up briefly along the bottom of the window. However if you click save again, when there are no changes whatsoever to the document, nothing happens – no progress bar, no extra memory usage, nada. I can only assume this is a generous feature built in to reassure the customer. I myself click save about five times per minute, whether or not i’ve written anything.

Another nice consequence of this feature is that you can write a few sentences, save, open a new window and do something else, then return to the document an hour later, click save again and feel like you’re making progress.

Smile!

Meet my friends:

: )     : (     : O       :S        -_-

These guys are some of the smileys i use most frequently. The question i put to you is, will there ever be (or is there already) a place for these smileys in the hearts of the grammarians.

Now it’s fair to say that smileys serve as a shortcut so we don’t have to turn our every IM into epic prose. If they’re ever to be recognised as a legitimate form of punctuation it will have to be demonstrated that it is more than just a lazy alternative to writing out a few more words. They’re going to have to genuinely add something to a sentence. Now clever old me, being clever (and old) has worked you all up into a frenzy of doubt and expectation. You’re asking, “but when, Luke? When will somebody prove that smileys count?!” But don’t worry, i’ll do it. In fact i even had the idea before i started writing this!

Now the first two smileys up there are pretty simple, they express basic happiness or displeasure. Arguably these sentiments could easily be included with a few extra words. Hence:

“I’ll be coming home soon! : )”
becomes
“I’m glad to be coming home soon!” or “I can’t wait to come home!”

and “I have to be back by ten : (” becomes “unfortunately, i have to be back by ten” or “I have to be back by ten, which sucks.” We might pause here to debate the grammatical merit of ’sucks’ but pausing is a habit reserved for people with too much time, (and people with Sky+) so onwards.

:S and : O are also pretty dismissable, easily replaced with a pointed “…” or an “i’m shocked to hear…” (incidentally i think that : O holds pretty much the same meaning as ‘OMG’)

This fellow is better -_- but is dangerously close to the crazy horizontal masterpiece faces used by kawaiidiots. See also @_@ ~_~ ^-^ \*^_^*/ and i think we can all agree that granting these any literary merit is a slippery slope to madness and social decay.

Well that’s it then, all my favourite smileys rejected. Never mind. Go home.

The End.

…?

Or is it?

dun-dun-duuuuun! Time to break out my thus far concealed favourite smiley of all! Here goes!…

: P <—-zomg!

I love that little guy. He truly expresses something that cannot be easily defined. Explaining his mystical meaning would be like trying to explain how the colour red actually looks, to someone who’s never seen it before. Maybe it can be done, but it’s certainly not going to be easy. Watch what happens when we try to compensate the sentence:

“Sounds like fun : P”
becomes:
“Sounds like fun… NOT!” or “I am being cheeky and toying with you here but not in an offensive or necessarily totally genuine way when i say that that sounds like fun.”

hmmm.. no dice. God knows how this smiley came into existence in the first place, have you ever made that face? Imagine if we stuck our tongues out to the side like that when we wanted to express the kind of gentle-but-maybe-a-little-sarcastic kind of sentiment which that smiley embodies:

“Hey man, going to that party tonight?!”
“Hell yeah! Party on down! Bleaearrrggh…“

I think you’d agree it would look a little odd. Furthermore i frequently find myself wishing it was ok to use this smiley in a formal typing situation. Consider this hypothetical email to one of my tutors:

“The essay is going well, i’ve been reading Lewis’ ‘On the Plurality of Worlds.’ It’s pretty tricky stuff.”
Compare with:
“The essay is going well, i’ve been reading Lewis’ ‘On the Plurality of Worlds.’ It’s pretty tricky stuff : P”

You can see how the first example could be interpreted as a rather deadpan cry for help, whereas really i’m shooting for a kind of ‘i’m reading it and it’s hard but not too hard, but i’m also not so arrogant to think it’s going to be easy for me’ kind of vibe. But that’s not an easy sentiment to express, especially in a concise email. My alternative would be something like:
“The essay is going well, i’ve been reading Lewis’ ‘On the Plurality of Worlds.’ That Lewis is one crazy cat lol!!”

I think that this guy : P basically serves as a mood-lightener. Pop him on the end if a sentence as you would a question mark, except instead of denoting a question you’re indicating that the sentence should be taken lightly. It’s a little mark to show that whatever you said, don’t take it too seriously. A disclaimer to say that you may or may not mean what you just wrote, and that everyone should just relax.

And everyone did. The End.

Note: I don’t usually have a space between the colon and the open brackets (or capital P, or S, or whatever) but i have to put one there to stop WordPress triggering its own dumb little graphics. If anyone knows a way to turn them off i’d be grateful.