The question is – did I just end-punctuate that sentence, or not?

It looks more than a little odd to end on two characters that most of us read as a face or emotion, and then to put a full stop. Especially as those two characters are almost invariably punctuation marks themselves. But ever increasingly, in the media most of us use to communicate and express ourselves most often (ie on a machine, using a keyboard of some type, probably online, and either in a blog, email or text message), we find the usage of emoticons seeping into the acceptable spectrum. And when something becomes ‘acceptable’, rules will start to govern its usage.

Personally, it irks me no end when somebody ends a sentence with BOTH an emoticon AND a punctuation mark. I’m a pedant, evidently, with my own set of unpublished rules, but something about three or four pieces of punctuation piling up on each other to contrary purposes really gets to me. It’s not that it’s incorrect: any sentence with an emoticon in it is going to be ‘incorrect’ by traditional standards. It’s just plain untidy.

Oh well, all of this simply from reading somebody’s status update on twitter. It’s a marvel how the grumpy old man surfaces at the smallest of hints. I’ll probably return to the topic of grammar and txtspk, they’re close to the heart of an English Literature graduate and lover of etymology, perhaps I’ll try to write an essay with no vowels or punctuation

UPDATE: Before posting this, I didn’t realise that either wordpress or most browsers would render my emoticons as actual smiley faces. Which kind of tidies up the messiness I was talking about. But they do looks cute. I’d code the m in as characters if I was a full geek, but I’ve not earned those stripes yet…