It Beats a Blank Stare

I plead guilty to occasionally using emoticons, the ubiquitous and insidious combining of punctuation marks to approximate faces tipped on their side in order to clue a reader as to one's real attitude. It's the ultimate passive-agressive gesture, as in I'm going to say something that could be construed as nasty and sarcastic but I'll throw in a little colon, dash, and paranthesis to show you I'm not serious. In acting it's called "indicating," when the outward expression of an emotion is unsustained by anything approaching sincerity. It also demonstrates how pathetically inept we are at expressing ourselves verbally, when we substitute little manufactured images in lieu of making a little extra effort at linguistic precision. And just so none of you take me seriously and get offended by this rant, :-).