Socks wrote:Platypodes wrote:Also, they serve an special purpose in IM/IRC of letting one discuss primary and secondary topics without confusion.
I thought I was one of the few people that did that :S My attention span is too short to have just one conversation (and I typically type faster than whomever I am talking to, so I've gotta add a second [or even a third] conversation topic for something to do)
Speaking of which, do you ever get into the situation where you're having a second conversation and then you want to start a new topic? I have gone into bracket territory before in conversations ^_^
I've used brackets, but not in quite the same way.... See, sometimes I fall into a slightly different format in which a second conversation is parenthetical but clearly related to the primary one, and a third conversation is parenthetical but clearly related to the second one. In that case, the third one goes in brackets
within parentheses.
For instance:
Someone: So, I told him the cuckoo clocks were getting out of hand.
Someone: (He's got 43 of them FFS!)
Someone: and he had a fit.
Otherperson: Well, it's about time you said something.
Otherperson: (Geez, where does he put them all?)
Someone: He said I just didn't understand him....
Someone: (Mostly in the dining room. It's pretty distracting at dinnertime.)
Otherperson: (I should think it would be.)
Otherperson: ([Dining room? Don't you guys have an eat-in kitchen?])
Someone: ([No, we moved a couple months ago.])
Someone: (Have you ever tried to eat with 43 clocks cuckooing at you?)
Someone: I said understanding him wouldn't make it a @#$% bit easier to live in this house anymore.
Otherperson: ([Oh yeah, forgot about that.])
Otherperson: (Can't say I have.)
Someone: Then he threw the begonia out the window.
Socks wrote: Oh, and another random point: What about periods? When you end a sentence with a smiley, do you also include a period? I always thought of smilies as sort of like something in parenthesis, so it would follow that the period would be after the smiley, but that looks downright ugly. But if you put the period before the smiley... Ex:"I like chicken.

It is tasty" Then it seems like the smiley is part of the next sentence... (In that case I'd probably move the smiley to the end, but you know what I mean).
Does anybody actually begin sentences with smileys? I'm accustomed to smileys always referencing what was said
before them, and I never thought a period would change that, so I always put the period first. =)