Institute of Semantic Restructuring

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Semantic Restructuring is the pursuit of enlightenment, enlivenment, empowerment through the creative re-arranging of the building blocks of meaning. For a better description, Start Here.


2005:09:01

946 - A Tag by any Other Name

A friend writes

<g> is an early emoticon for "grin"

I think it's worth the effort to maintain a greater level of precision on this. An emoticon is an image, or icon, intended to convey emotion. The "Have a nice day!" smiley face from the early 70s is probably the best known, and most loathed, example of such. Traditionally, inclusion of any such non-verbal nonsense in writing was considered trite at best, vaguely pathological at worst, but in the email era and beyond the rules are changing.

However, <g> is not an emoticon. It is not ascii or any other kind of art. It is a tag, as in a mark-up tag, as in "hypertext mark-up language," or its more valuable predecessor, "standard generalized mark-up language." I would call <g> "a semantic markup tag providing emotive-contextualization." I would not call it an emoticon. And I would, in certain company, stand on this distinction because part of what the next few decades promise to bring is a greater appreciation and application of text-context-subtext-medium distinctions, McLuhan notwithstanding.

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Chris L wrote


Isn't an emoticon really a postfix tag? Not all tags come in pairs and an emoticon is just a post-facto application based on the relevant grammar or syntax. So That Link-- he's such a bastard :) and That Link-- he's such a bastard and That Link-- he's such a bastard are basically the same things aren't they?

Chris L wrote


Well, you can't see my markup, so basically the last two were 1) postfix with a <g> and 2) surrounded by a <grin> tag set...

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