And interesting question today on Ask Metafilter about “the grammatical relationship between emoticons and punctuation” — what’s the consensus on handling the insertion of a smiley into punctuated text, essentially.

Personally, I think the question of what an emoticon is — punctuation? a word/phrase? — is maybe not so simply answered at this point (and the varying answers in that thread seem to support my thought).  Are there any analogues to the emoticon in pre-Internet English writing?  Is this more or less virgin territory, or is there some history to work from?

I can think of, say, inserting a parenthetical exclamation point (!) as a sort of punctuation-as-mood-marker (and like wise a puzzled (?) marker), but I’m not sure that’s more than non-kissin’ cousins with the emoticon in terms of flexibility and expressive variety.

(Here’s another AskMe, from 2006, on emoticons and mood and which mentions the (!) thing in the first comment as it turns out.)

One of these days, I should do a roundup of emoticon use on Metafilter in general.