Image may be NSFW.
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Not being a big user of emoticons or emoji, I usually have to pause to arrive at the difference between them. So I hadn’t given any thought to their function in the sentence until I came across Gretchen McCullough’s post querying how these little gremlins infesting our written language ought to be punctuated. She combines the two, as do most people who write about them. Emoji, after all, began as a colorful and labor-saving alternative to stacking up pieces of punctuation in order to create an image. Now that Moby-Dick has been translated into emoji—a feat that’s difficult to imagine using parentheses and colons — I suspect we’ll start seeing discussions that treat emoticons and emoji differently. For the sake of argument, though, we’ll lump them together here.
McCullough asks how to punctuate “around” emoji, assuming them to be part of the sentence they accompany. She offers three obvious alternatives: punctuate after, punctuate before, and don’t punctuate at all. E.g.:
- (Don’t forget to bring chocolate :).)/ OMG Image may be NSFW.
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. - (Don’t forget to bring chocolate.) :) / OMG. Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view. - (Don’t forget to bring chocolate) :) / (Don’t forget to bring chocolate :)) / OMG Image may be NSFW.
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The third set has two versions of the emoticon sentence because eliminating the full-stop period still leaves the parentheses, the close of which can be placed before or after the emoticon, depending on which version confuses you less.
With differing preferences in that regard, all of the emo-users I queried went for the non-end-stopped alternative, because, as one pointed out, these little doohickeys show up most often in writing where punctuation as a whole has disappeared. A typical Facebook message, for instance, even without these symbols, might read something like:
- man I am so pumped you are the best dont forget beer
Perfectly understandable in context, and any festoons would simply fall, as Tyler Schnoebelen (who wrote a whole dissertation on this) notes, at the end of the sentence.
Others aren’t having it. They like to think of emojis and emoticons as punctuation in and of themselves, a variety of discourse marks. To me, that’s trying to massage the things into a category that can’t contain them. Punctuation itself, after all, emerged after several civilizations had already developed writing, and ballooned only with the advent of printing. So it’s possible, first, to imagine a kind of writing that doesn’t call for punctuation; and second, to imagine some other category arising, fulfilling some other function for a different era — one, say, when text is not so much published as streamed.
The question becomes complicated only if we also imagine these symbols and little pictures making their way into the kinds of texts that are routinely punctuated. Thus far I have not seen that happening. If they were to make the leap back from tweets and quick emails to essays and arguments, my guess is that they would come closer to the sense of the medieval illuminated manuscript than to any concept of punctuation. Those manuscripts did not just contain illustrations of the topic at hand. They also used inhabited and historiated initials, which could be decorative or actually partake of the subject; and drolleries, thumbnail images in the margins. These illustrative elements seem closer to the sense of the emoji. And since there weren’t a lot of punctuation rules when such manuscripts were being prepared, perhaps we could go to an ad hoc system here as well.
meanwhile though so long as punctuation is dying in the twittersphere the argument seems moot to me what about you (?_?)
