Emoticonic

The fame comes from its acronymic, telegraphic (sometimes telepathic), and emoticonic informality. What too many online writers fail to realize is that there are formal requirements for the most effective, most economical informal style.

These rules are shared by the community, that is, mutually manifest to all its members. In the case of the emoticon, it demands emoticonic literacy from the users beyond the simplest well-known compositions (Reid 1994:31–32, Watson 1996). Therefore, it is very likely that the authors of the emoticons in (16) will not obtain the desired effect without the aid of the information of the message that precedes them, which anchors their meanings […]