ButterCookie

[nicepace]

Although the advantage of smilies is that they do convey a bit of emotion, which is often missing in the written word. Without them you'd see a lot more arguments on here I'm sure. Otherwise I'd have to type the emotion so that you get the point *shrug* :-)

Smilies promote laziness in writing, just as spell checkers promote laziness in spelling (of course, spell checkers also promote bad spelling, but that's another post altogether).

But I'm willing to give a pass to smilies that just sit there. I use "text smilies" myself occasionally. The ones I really hate are the ones that move and jump around. They give me a headache.