← Back to context

Comment by mghackerlady

1 day ago

unrelated but I've never understood how to put a smiley at the end of parenthetical sentences (which comes up surprisingly often for me since I use smileys a lot and also like using parentheses). Just the smiley as an end parentheses (like this :) feels off but adding another parentheses (like this :) ) makes it look like it should be nested which causes problems since I also tend to nest parenthetical sentences (like (this)).

Yes I enjoy lisp, how could you tell

The answer is obviously to balance your smiley faces and wrap the entire statement in the smiley face sentiment. ((: Like this :))

  • I like this simply for the absurdity of it, but will only use it when the entire parenthetical is modified by the smiley instead of a single word or phrase (:since I really like it:) but (it looks ugly, no hard feelings :) )

Your comment made me realise that there's logic to this (like this :), since in HTML we can:

    <li> do this
    <li> and this

instead of: <li> ... </li>

and <img alt='this'> instead of <img ... />

You might like Lisp, but what you're saying reminds me of the late 00s/early 2010s xHTML2 vs. HTML5 debate :)

I tend to rephrase myself so I dont end a statement inside a parenthesis with a smiley.

It's one of those things I think are worth putting some extra effort into, I'm glad to see at least one other person giving it some thought. Thx <3

Synthetic example:

"Вот его, нет, не допустили (сама знаешь, почему)))"

My translation:

"But him - no, they didn't let him in (of course you know why :)"

When I went from texting friends in Russian or Ukrainian back to English, I missed right parentheses as a smiley; one or two - hi), hello)) - to me are like a smile, by ))) and )))) there's some laughing or some other joke going on. Native speakers could weigh in; my native tongue is English.

Use dashes and the problem goes away! Well, you gain the LLM witch-hunt, but heh, no free lunch.

allow me to introduce my friend – turned smiley here he is: ´◡` (quite useful for brackets ´◡`)

you can find him on windows by pressing Win + ; not as fast as typing, but quite faster then typing and then wondering if thats too much brackets or too little

  • I love kaomoji so I use this on occasion but nothing can match the subtle passive aggressiveness and level of expression unmatched by anything else :)

I’ve always been bothered by instances of your first example, and I mostly use “XD” instead of “:)” to sidestep the issue in my own writing.