:-) :-( ;-) :-P x-( :-D :-o

Face it, people from our generation are more busy than Obama. With jobs demanding more and more from people, and their wives demanding even more, people are either in their office or with their family and at times with their friends (just a chosen few). Interacting face to face is hard as we have no time or the person is another continent. So Instant messaging and text messaging are gaining popularity. There is no commitment from either parties. You send and reply at your own convenience.

Reading or typing on IM or SMS can make a conversation as boring as driving a Corolla or watching Delhi-6. The use of emotions can make you convey your feelings easily without having to type "I am laughing" or "I am crying" or "My tongue is hanging out". Even if it was the lamest joke, you can make the other feel better by responding with :-). I am often tempted to use them in my posts since whenever I ask my friends if the post I wrote was funny, they ask me what on earth am I talking about ;-). 

These were actually invented by a professor at Carnegie Mellon way back in 1982. I believe for the same problems I have, no one got his joke on paper. He invented only the happy face :-) and the sad face :-(. Later people made million variations of it. In fact, some of the emotions cannot be expressed even by humans :-). 

I saw the smiley face way back in 1997 in one of my friends emails. He had a :-) here and there, and I thought that guy was smoking weird stuff. When I asked him why doesn't he do a spell check on his emails, he told me look at it sideways. Once I put my 2 ton 15 inch CRT monitor on the side it all made sense. Regardless, I told him to stop using it, as I wasn't going to keep titling the monitor to get what he was trying to express.

It is also used in professional environments. My manager keeps pinging me smileys after he assigns me five days worth of work, to be done in one day. I don't understand if he's happy that I didn't protest, or happy that I actually said yes so that he can sit and do nothing. I take five days to finish it anyways :-). Its usage is so widespread that I see them in our Business Requirements.

The :-P is abused the most. Humor nowadays is more sarcastic than ever. Fat Americans are used to it as every sitcom has slapstick comedy. You can get away with anything by using it. For eg, "Bush is a b****** :-P", or "You are fat :-P" doesn't sound that rude, thanks to :-P. I have also fallen prey for it. I use :-P as every alternate word. One cannot deny that there is some truth in sarcasm. Calling Bush a nigger doesn't make any sense. Whereas calling Bush a white nut case and saying :-P, actually says otherwise. Think next time before you say :-P or I was kidding. If you have the need to, then you probably shouldn't have said it in the first place.

At the end of the day, the use of emotions makes a conversation a bit more pleasing, entertaining and connect at a higher level. Of all the emotions, my personal favorite is B-). Just to confirm, it means cool and not blind :o)