[UA] UA the Miniatures Combat Game (Was Re: Bitterness)

[thanatos]

>===== Original Message From Patrick None <ua at lists.uchicago.edu> =====

> Thoughts?
> patrick

Once I was annoyed by them, but after losing two good friends over the past 
ten years to miscommunication, I can see the point.  To me, an emoticon is 
macro-punctuation.  Looking at Latin written on the sides of buildings in 
Rome, I was struck by the fact that there was no punctuation, not even gaps 
between words.  The word endings would help you parse the mass of letters into 
discrete packets of words, and proper word syntax would help you form all the 
important clauses.  But somewhere down the line, someone thought that it 
wasn't good enough.  You needed some way to capture the urgency of the 
imperative without having to use the imperative ending.  Also, it would be 
nice to preserve the rhythm and flow of speech on paper, so commas, periods, 
colon and semicolons evolved.  You might say that we've been writing letters 
for centuries, so why get lazy now?  Well, email comes with a subtext of 
urgency.  A reply is requested, and no 24 hours turnaround between sending and 
reception will occur.  So it possesses the spontaneity of a phone call, 
without the verbal inflection so critical to that mode of discourse.  Due to 
these limitations, new punctuation is needed.  Emoticons fill in the gap 
nicely, until something else comes along.

The Empire Never Ended.
  -- _Valis,_ Philip K. Dick


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