Apparently, France is trying to send the semicolon the way of the dodo. This Guardian article offers both sides of the ancient punctuation debate. Read the whole article; it’s totally worth it.

Jeanette Winterson: PRO-semicolon

“I like them - they are a three-quarter beat to the half and full beats of commas and full stops. Prose has its own musicality, and the more notation the better. I like dashes, double-dashes, comashes and double comashes just as much. The colon is an umlaut waiting to jump; the colon dash is teasingly precipitous.”

Richard Hugo: ANTI-semicolon

“If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts. But do not use semicolons.”

Gertrude Stein: Could care less

“I use it. I’ve no feelings about it - it’s just there. People actually get worked up about that kind of shite, do they? I don’t fucking believe it. They should get a fucking life or a proper job. They’ve got too much time on their hands, to think about nonsense.”

*cough*

My question for France: Ok, so you don’t like it in sentences… whatever. But how do you expect The Internet to express itself properly with out ; ) ?

Google-talk (gchat) offers a menagerie of animated emoticons… it will rotate your smiley-faces and make them wink, turn your less-than-three into a pink heart, etc. But one animation has left me entirely mystified:

:(|) = [colon, open parentheses, pipe-key (shift+backslash), close parentheses] which is then rotated 90-degrees clockwise and filled in pink.

WHAT IS IT???

Perhaps we should observe each frame of its animation individually…

Stage 1: Directly after typing it in.

Stage 2: beginning rotation, at 45-degrees

Stage 3: end rotation, color-ized.

Hmm. Entirely unhelpful. Similarly, a google search of “:(|)” yielded zero results.

Using visual cues only, I can see a few possibilities:

• a clam with eyes
• a monkey
• a vagina with eyes
• a jim-crow-era minstrel illustration (let’s hope it’s not this one)
• some combination of the above: a monkey-clam, a blackface-vagina, etc.

Now, don’t get all “eureka! it’s a monkey-clam!” just yet… These options would seem feasible, that is, until you think about the meaning of the word “emoticon”.

According to wikipedia:

an emoticon is a small piece of specialized ASCII art (usually two to five characters, always on a single line) used in text messages as informal markup to indicate emotions and attitudes that would be conveyed by body language in face-to-face communications.

Trim away the definition-fat, and you get “an emoticon is a digital facial expression”.

When, we might wonder, would it be wise to respond to someone with a clam-face? or a monkey-face?

Friend X: “hey! how are you?”
Me: [makes a monkeyface]
Friend X: “ohhh…would you like a piece of my banana?”
Me: [makes monkeyface, again]
Friend X: “huh, you want me to groom your scalp for lice?”
Me: [another monkeyface, but with frustration at its inability to accurately and specifically express how I feel]
Friend X: “alright, we can watch Project X again!”

I am completely stumped. Help?