What Are Smilies/Emoticons and Acronyms?
Where text on a screen is so emotionless, Internet users started using Smilies (Emoticons). When viewed from the side, these strings of characters form expressive faces. e.g. 🙂 is a smiling face and 🙁 is a sad face. They also used Acronyms to replace well used phrases or to represent real life emotions (such as laughing out loud). Finally, there was also a technical reason why smilies and abbreviations sprung up on the net. By cutting down on the amount of text, they save on ‘bandwidth’ and possibly storage space.. So that everyone can understand one another, an unofficial set of smilies and acronyms cropped up. The following is a list of the more popular ones and, the ones you are most likely to come across on CFS-20s and #cfs-20s. CFS-20s and other CFS/ME/FMS mailing lists/news groups also use acronyms and terms that are specific to these communities. Some of them are just general medical acronyms, where as others will only ever be found in CFS-20s and/or other CFS/ME/FMS groups.
