Article: Emoti-whats? Emoticons :-).

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As a reader, you've seen colons and semicolons, hyphens and parentheses, and even an occasional capital D. But did you ever imagine that the dot and comma of a semicolon can suggest eyes, with one of them winking? Or that the boring old uppercase D can be an open-mouthed grin? If you're not an e-mail user, you might not know about those tidy little bundles of symbols called emoticons.

Emoticons are a series of keyboard symbols, letters, and numbers that represent a facial expression, such as a smile or a frown. Some are more complicated than that, as you see at right.

The funny thing about emoticons is E M0 that they need ...

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