Emoticons are nothing more than characters that look like a face when viewed sideways.
Never addressed by such people is the question of how humans have managed to communicate with the written word for thousands of years without strewing crudely fashioned ideograms across their parchments. It is as if the written word were a cutting-edge technology without useful precedents. Other smiley partisans maintain that, since many messages are tossed off extemporaneously, the medium has more in common with talking than writing, hence the need for emoticons. This neatly sidesteps the awkward fact that what these people are engaged in is, in fact, nothing other than plain old writing and reading, and that, as always, they may have to invest some time and effort in the act if they don't want to mess it up. The Globe does not record, however, whether he terminated this statement with a smiley.