emoticons !!!!!!!!!!

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I am reasonably sure that I do things that other people find annoying. I can’t tell you what they are. Because if I knew what they were, I think I would make an effort not to do them. Which mean this: those annoying things I do? I’m not aware of them. Emoticons and exclamation points, I find ... annoying. I say that with some trepidation because people that I love, people that I think highly of, people who I know would lend me a hand if I were down, use one or -- !!!! -- both of these in communication. If it weren’t for email or Facebook (Twitter seems curiously immune to these two habits), I wouldn’t know this. I could go through life, running into these folks, and be blissfully unaware they were typographical terrorists. Just a guess here, but I’m pretty sure one of the world’s great advances was when the alphabet replaced pictures. When, instead of painstakingly drawing a picture of your dog, you could just write: “my DOG is dead.” Oh, and by the way, an unhappy smiley face would not make me feel any better about this. Also, I’m not crazy about reading things that move. Moveable type was an enormous leap ahead for Western civilization. But the wonderful thing about moveable type was that it didn’t move. As for exclamation points, perhaps we can think of them this way: they are very lethal, and one shot does the trick. Two, and you’ve just put a bullet in a dead body. For those of you who move into the double-digit zone with exclamation ! points !, I stop reading after exclamation point number 10. The noise is just too loud. Soon, we’ll look at people who overuse italics and people WHO WRITE EMAIL IN ALL CAPITALS.