Liam wrote:That I understand. I seem to offend quite a lot! Apart from being confidently unconventional in my thinking (which by itself draws opposition), I can be more focused on the logic of my post than on the emotion of it, which isn’t always the best.
That probably applies to me sometimes, too. Well, I don't know if my thinking is unconventional or not - it may be in some areas, at least - but certainly I am usually more interested in the logic of things than the unpredictable emotional aspects others may read into them, which I often don't understand anyway. (If you haven't already got the impression, it is probable that I have some form of Asperger's syndrome.)
Liam wrote:But that is why they have created emoticons, so I should use them a little more.
I don't like them, and never use them. I tend to agree with the opinion of some that, if an emoticon is needed to convey that something is not meant seriously or literally, then there is something wrong with the way it is worded, and work is needed to improve that.
Some guides to "netiquette" I have read say that you can never use an emoticon to remove the offensiveness of something that is, by its wording, offensive to some, and I tend to agree with that, too.
Also, I just think they look childish and undignified, somehow - peppering one's words with little cartoonish pictures (or punctuation marks, formerly, that suggested cartoonish pictures).
But that's me; I seem to be in a minority now. I have a friend who lives in France, so, for 25 years or so, our main method of communication has been by e-mail. When he first adopted e-mail (which was a bit later than me - unusual with anything technological for me to get in before someone else), he and I both agreed how absolutely appalling and tacky smileys were (I don't think the word "emoticon" existed then), and he certainly concurred with me that he would never use them, no matter what. But, by some strange transformation in him, he is now one of the most intensive users of them that I know; but I have not softened my own view about them in the slightest.
(By the way, someone once noticed that, when I quote words from someone else, any smileys get transformed to a word like "smile" or "frown", or something, and they asked whether I edited it to that because I don't like smileys.
(No, I don't do that - I feel that would be patronizing, somehow. It just seems that the software I use automatically does that, by some means I don't really know. And indeed, it must be at least two different sets of software that do it, because it happens whether I am posting from a Windows or Macintosh computer. I tend to use text-based editors for constructing posts, and when I post directly in the edit box on this forum, I have it in plain-text mode - so I think perhaps text-based software tends to do this.
(I eschew non-text-based software (or settings) when only text is required because, over the years, I have just seen this cause problems with incompatibility between sender and receiver, unorthodox characters changed into gibberish characters, and such things, and I like to keep things simple and readable. It's amazing to me that, even today, many such things are still hopelessly non-standard, so that every different piece of software reads things differently (or not at all), and shows something different. Even accented characters for other languages can do this sometimes.)
Regards, Michael.