© 1993 by Lawrence I. Charters
Washington Apple Pi Journal, Vol. 15, no. 9, September 1993, pp. 43-44.
Once upon a time people were reserved, even reverent. Unless you were being accused of witchcraft or heresy, it was considered impolite for the educated class to get emotional – about anything. The phrase, “you, sir, are a scoundrel,” would have caused heads to turn just a few decades back. “Oh, my. Someone is very angry.” Today, calling someone a scoundrel will be taken by everyone as a joke, or even a compliment.
But not anymore!
In the not too distant past, English teachers would scold students for using exclamation points, and rap your knuckles if you attempted to emphasize something by underlining. “Your thoughts should convey emotion without adornment,” they’d admonish in hushed tones. [Hey, I’m not making this up. Stop laughing.]
No longer. If someone is a jerk, you write, “You jerk!” Or, better yet, “You jerk!!!” If you have a Macintosh, you can do even more violence to traditional English prose:
You jerk!!!
If you have a color DeskWriter, you can get really creative, with three dimensional letters in bright red. Or maybe a sick green. Six inches high.
Alas, most of the computer world is not blessed with Macintosh computers; they must plod along with every letter exactly the same height and width as every other. And much of what is written on computers today – maybe most – is never printed. How do you convey emotion without italics, underscores and other tricks??? Especially on a bulletin board or in E-mail, where much of what is written tends toward the emotional?
You do it _like this_.
The strange placement of underscore characters shows how to underline something on a bulletin board – you place underscores before and after the word or phrase being emphasized. Note that, traditionally, underlining was a typographic convention for italics, so if you want to _italicize_ something, _use underscores_.
On rare occasions, however-and I mean *rare* occasions – you can use asterisks to highlight a word for emphasis.
Because of its special cult following (numbering in the hundreds of millions), the dollar sign can also be used to highlight words – but only words containing an “s.” Even then, care must be taken to make sure the meaning make sense in context. For example, if you were talking about the Great Flood of’93, it would make sense to say something like:
Ah, yes, the mighty Mi$$i$$ippi
but it doesn’t make too much sense to say
homele$$.
You can ALSO, but only OCCASIONALLY, write things in upper case. This either indicates a rise in inflection or yelling, depending on context. Do you UNDERSTAND, or should I REPEAT that?
Ironic capitalization is also useful, if you want to sound mockingly pompous. If used improperly, however, it can Bring An End To Life As We Know It. Or Worse.
Exclamation points are back. In a big way!! And you can use them in a pseudo-Spanish fashion, both before and after the word or phrase being emphasized. !!Really!!
With a little creativity, you can use parenthetical exclamation points to indicate quiet alarm or caution:
Everyone (!!!) must back up before Friday.
Much of E-mail and bulletin board banter is written in “conversational English,” with deliberately casual spelling and grammar. Kinda like the way ya talk when yer not giving a lecture. Y’know? This is an excellent way to convey a tone without any strange typography, but be warned: it really baffles non-native English speakers. Y’know what I mean, eh?
Parenthetical phrases come in several flavors. You can carry on an ironic conversation with yourself:
The department budget will sail through without modification. (Yeah. Right.)
For variety, you can use square brackets:
I always thought him a bit strange. (OK, I thought him a whole lot strange.) [OK, OK, to be honest, "strange" is too mild a word.]
You can also use dashes for parenthetical phrase. Since a bulletin board won’t support a true dash, use two hyphens in a row:
I looked at his proposal -- one of the worst pieces of writing I'd ever seen -- and said, 'Boss, I'll never be able to fill your shoes.'
“Smilies” are a very popular form of expression, but mostly on bulletin boards (they just don’t look right in regular office E-mail). If you want to poke fun at a computer expert who did something disastrous, you could write:
Still a novice, I see. :-)
and the strange combination of colon, dash and parenthesis indicates you are “smiling” and the comment is not to be taken seriously. If you don’t see a smile, tilt your head to the left a bit—yes, even you Republicans out there … 🙂
There are also many, many standard bits of jargon, acronyms and abbreviations designed to convey emotion or complex thoughts:
LOL = Laughing Out Loud
ROTFL = Rolling On The Floor Laughing
TANSTAAFL = There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch
The last phrase, incidentally, predates personal computers, E-mail, and networks: TANSTAAFL is a very succinct summation of much of the philosophy contained in the science fiction of Robert A. Heinlein. Put another way, there is a dizzying depth of culture to what often looks like juvenile blithering. Or, possibly, juvenile blithering is degrading some of our most important pillars of modem culture.
Hey, _I_ don't care EITHER way, y'know? Get a *life* already!!!