I don‘t do emoticons. I just can’t.

Really, with my intense interest in symbols, icons and writing systems, I ought to. Beyond the basic appeal of little cartoons made of mostly punctuation, I have a humor that veers between very dry to overstated silly, either of which can suffer from a lack of facial and body language cues, and often leads me to send disclaimers or follow-up email translating my previous turns of phrase.

But I just can’t. Something in me rebels. I will include the occasional conversational cue like (hee) or (hem, haw), or stage directions, such as *scratching head*.

That said, I do really like them and remain impressed that I can usually understand the meaning without a helpful chart, like this one. And I really like the horizontal variants—what I had called the manga set even before I knew they were conclusively Japanese. Thanks to a link from a new blog I’ve been reading, Geisha asobi blog (who, in turn, got it from Boing Boing), I can feel a twinge of regret that I can’t effectively do Japanese character sets. C’mon, who hasn’t felt the need to include a ninja throwing a shuriken in the odd email?