Welcome to Brad's Gallery of Smiles... the place to explain what all those really whacky little pieces of Netspeak REALLY mean.... as a veteran of internet communciation with a net history spanning a whole seven months I should know by now.... (well, it seems longer.....) Anyway, voila!! Welcome. Feel free to pinch any of my smiley ideas (except for my personal smiley ©..... *8) ) Enjoy your stay.
The original smiley.... and in my opinion the most boring.... unfortunately, like death, this smiley is unavoidable. It has long past its use-by date a LONG LONG time ago.... but, being the simplest way to get that "I'm happy" message across... people will always continue to use it (including myself....)
Just as bland and unoriginal as the aforementioned smiley...
Someone thought it would show great originality and imagination by adding a nose to those two poor little smileys. The plan backfired miserably. I don't see these smileys very much; people couldn't be bothered to stick on the nose... I wonder why???
Now this has to be one of the weirdest smileys I have ever seen... I saw it once in Miranda Devine's column in Sydney's Daily Telegraph. According to the column, this smiley signifies that the writer is hungover.... but I have never ever seen this smiley on the net... and it is so ridiculous I'm not likely to either.
This is one of the coolest smileys I have ever seen, but oddly enough, the Angry Smiley never gets the attention that I believe it deserves... this smiley is great for expressing frustration, displeasure, disillusion... I can only hope that I see this under-rated smiley more often.
This simplistic smiley also doesn't get enough of a workout amongst the internet community.... the Sobbing Smiley is another one of those versatile smileys that just seems to escape everyone's notice. The effect of this smiley is even better where colour is available so the tear can be coloured light blue for extra authenticity.
The ugliest and most meaningless smiley of the lot. A variation on the :) smiley, this smiley is wide open to interpretation; some have told me that it signifies "cool eyes", others have suggested "mischievious eyes" or "friendly eyes" or even "sexy eyes". I use it sparingly, because I have NEVER seen ANYTHING in real life closely resembling these eyes, even in cartoons and computer games.
This is quite a clever smiley... representing the devil's face.... see.. the '}' is supposed to be the horns of a devil, and the '>' is supposed to be his slanting eyes... I've only seen this once.. but quite a smart smiley nevertheless.
A net.friend of mine from Belgium created this smiley (I think.....) The Pouting Smiley. In his words, it's supposed to be "a show-off frown.. how do you say.. like a pout?" Quite a charming little smiley anyway.
The same friend from Belgium gave me this smiley, the Santa Smiley. It took me a while to see the resemblance, but believe me, it IS there.... just stand about five humdred feet away from the monitor, tilt your head 42 degrees to the left and squint hard but not too hard after drinking thirteen gin and tonics, and believe me, you will see Santa Claus.
This is my personal smiley.. no one is allowed to use this smiley except for me. Comprende?? Good.... well, I better give you this poor unfortunate smiley's background.... the '*' represents my hair which has a tendency to spike and stick out everywhere; the '8' represents my glasses; and the ')' represents... well, a smile!!!
Have you ever seen any smileys which AREN'T in this gallery???
Then feel free to e-mail
me about them with an explanation of what they mean.. please!!!
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