What are all those little symbols made out of punctuation marks that I sometimes see in e-mail messages and chat rooms?
Those “little symbols” are emoticons — emotional icons — and they’re used by some netizens to add emphasis and shades of meaning to written communication. They’re kind of cute, but you know, less is often more. Here are some of the main ones. To find mega-lists of literally hundreds of them, search for “emoticon” in a search engine. You’ll be amazed.
