I’d like to try a little exercise with you, oh fellow denizens of the Internet.

Find the last thing you posted online, be it chat message, tweet, Facebook status update or, if you’ve got more time than sense, blog post. Then what I would like you to do is read that post out loud — but with a twist. I’d like you to make all the faces you typed emoticons for, and any acronym you used, I’d like you to actually do the thing you said you were doing. (For example, if you typed “lol”, I would like you to laugh out loud; if you typed “lmao” I would like you to laugh until your arse falls off. Yes, literally.)

Did you look like a complete dingbat and/or a creep? Exactly. Herein lies part of the problem with online communication: while emoticons and acronyms were originally intended to allow for some semblance of “tone” to be indicated in the necessarily dry nature of text, they don’t really work all that well in the way that they tend to be used today.

Take the humble “lol”. Depending on your literacy level, you may actually put “lol” in a sentence where you really would laugh out loud. But more often than not, it seems, it’s used as a substitute for punctuation, and it doesn’t really matter what punctuation mark should have gone in there if we were going to be all persnickety about Standard English. No, many’s the time when I’ve seen people type a message ending with a redundant (and, frankly, somewhat disquieting) “lol” or even joining two completely largely unrelated sentences to one another. I recall one former Facebook “friend” (actually someone I went to school with but barely spoke to when I was there, let alone since) posting some epic rant about how she had had a difficult week lol but was looking forward to putting her feet up with a glass of wine lol xxx. That’s… no. That just doesn’t make any sense.

I think more infuriating to me than inappropriate lolling is the use of the tongueface smiley, however. I associate sticking your tongue out with a distinctly 1950s expression of rebellion — something an Enid Blyton character would do while running away from someone they didn’t like very much. It’s not something I generally think to do… well, at all really, as a 32 year old man, and so I tend not to pepper my online utterances with tongueface smileys at any time other than when I am clearly mocking someone and need to make it abundantly clear that I’m not actually being mean. I will confess to making a fair amount of use of the good old-fashioned smiley face emoticon, but that’s about it. (I don’t even use “XD”, whose usage annoys me for much the same reasons as “lol” does.)

I am sure I am overthinking this, and that the tongueface smiley has somewhat transcended its associations with Enid Blyton characters, but I still find it oddly jarring when I see it somewhere that it just doesn’t seem to belong. So again, I urge you, before you send that message, just read it out loud and make all the facial expressions you said you were making. If it feels weird to stick your tongue out… maybe take that particular colon-P out, hmm?