Comments on: Smiley faces and parenthesis

By: Greg D

Greg D — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 03:03:52 +0000

I can’t condone this sort of behavior. Ending a parenthetical with a portion of a smiley does leave a gaping hole and always bothers me. What about your mid-parenthetical smiley’s???? Fine, maybe I overuse smileys but seriously, how do you determine if that happens to be the one that closes your thought? I think that you haven’t in fact ended your comment and I just keep looking for it. Then, I’m really bothered by the period that follows.

I was bothered by this whole issue until I decided to use a space to separate the smiley from the right paren. This allows for a complete face, no seemingly double chin, and that completeness which we can only find with proper grammar and punctuation. You should try it (I’ll bet you’ll like it :) ).

By: Christopher Morace

Christopher Morace — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 00:15:28 +0000

I’ve also been troubled by this. I’ve resorted to placing the smiley outside of the parenthetical, which I’m sure will not be correct when they nail these things down in some Book of Writing Etiquette 2.0, but I think it is a more forgivable probem that man perpetual use of hanging prepositions. (This is an example of what I’m talking about.) :) Now that’s written it though it just looks like the smiley has horns in this font.

By: Scott Johnston

Scott Johnston — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 08:40:25 +0000

Dammit, the problem is much worse than I originally expected. It seems I don’t even understand the problem enough to realize it is a punctuation problem and not a grammar problem. Caught by the detail fascists…

By: Josh S

Josh S — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 05:38:59 +0000

You can always just use the cop-out of square brackets.

And what about Scheme as an email language? With all the parens, you’ll hardly notice the smiley [fortunately, the next revision of the Scheme standard will allow for square brackets as a substitute for parens :)].

On second, thought, that doesn’t look so good.

By: Bryan Cantrill

Bryan Cantrill — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 00:42:40 +0000

First, to be a meta-fascist: this is really a punctuation issue more than a grammar issue. Fortunately, I am also a punctuation fascist — and as such, have long been deeply troubled by exactly the issue you describe. In fact, this is a generalization of a preexisting parenthetical issue: ending a sentence-ending parenthetical note with an abbreviation. That is, take the following sentence: “Next time, I hope Cheney schedules a hunting trip with all of his buddies (e.g. Rumsfeld, Perle, Feith, etc.).” Should the “etc.” in the parenthetical note have a trailing period or not? The answer, believe it or not, is unclear: some sources claim that the period should be dropped in this case (and only in this case), while others claim that the period is always a part of the abbreviation, and must accompany it regardless of context. Worst of all, the most concrete sources usually use imprecise language to avoid taking a stand on the issue. (For example, “The Columbia Guide to Standard American English” claims that “abbreviations within parentheses may end with a period” — leaving open the possibility that they also may not.) And most style guides “solve” the problem by killing the messenger (which is usually “etc.”) with admonishments like “‘etc.’ should be used in only the most informal writing; its use in serious writing is strongly discouraged.”

As to the problem at hand: as you feared, your “solution” does indeed leave fascists like me upset — shaken even. (Of course, we spend so much of our lives upset that it’s unclear if being a little more upset even matters.) Should you wish a less upsetting solution, I recommend that you solve this problem in the time-honored way that we fascists have always solved such murky issues: restructure the sentence to avoid it. After all, we might appear to be fascist, but we are ultimately just passive-aggressive; language is simply too complicated to allow for absolute rigidity. (And at the risk of losing my fascist street cred, the fact that language allows for latitude in punctuation and grammar is clearly a Good Thing — it allows language to evolve. But note that that’s “evolve,” not “devolve.”)

By: Zeller

Zeller — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 23:48:28 +0000

Personally, this has bugged me for a long time. I usually either leave a space between :) and ) or I just neglect the end ). I take the stance that it is valid because of the rule that allows for not including the end punctuation of a complete quotation when it is the same as the end punctuation of the enclosing sentence. It also depends on how nested your parenthetical expressions are. When I have 2 or 3 levels of nesting, then I feel like all of the parenthesis are required to read it correctly.

On the subject of JB and email, I trust in gmail’s ability to sort it all out and display things correctly.

By: Faktor

Faktor — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 16:12:33 +0000

I am pretty sure (only pretty sure just in case it is not) this is embarrassing, but I have actually stopped trying to force Outlook to send my email as text solely because it replaces ‘:)’ with a funky character from the extended character set, which JB cannot read, but one that looks like a smiley face without having the double parentheses. My next problem is that Word thinks it’s grammatically incorrect and underlines the stupid thing with the dreaded green squiggly line (green squiggly line = “That looks right, doesn’t it? For the love of God, what’s wrong with my sentence?! And don’t you dare tell me it’s a fragment, Word!”).

By: Josh Richau

Josh Richau — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 15:37:30 +0000

1. Grandma Ruby does not care for your off the cuff dismissal of Ruby.
2. Perhaps it isn’t the smiley but the proliferation of “witty comments”
3. I actually try to just add a space between the final parenthesis and the smiley, this has the effect of making the smiley clear but keeping parenthetical entropy in check

Glad to know that you’re at least considering grammar as you write…

By: Abe

Abe — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 14:46:32 +0000

I completely relate to this problem, and as I’m unhappy with all available solutions I flop back and forth between them. I think lately I just try to find a way to work the smiley in before the end of the parens.