水池荷叶哪里多跑跑车:笑脸符号：你让我高兴，我就应该高兴吗？

MARY LOU DiNARDO checked three times to make sure: was that a smiley face at the end of the latest e-mail from her most dour client?

当玛丽连续看了三遍之后才敢确认：最后那个笑脸确实是来自她一个平时作风很严肃呆板的客户。

A West Coast real estate executive, he had an M.B.A. from a prestigious university and was “a very intellectual, serious man,” said Ms. DiNardo, president of TK/PR, a public relations firm. “I’ve been dealing with him for seven years. All of a sudden, while we’re discussing problems with a vendor, he’s signing off with these smiling or winking faces. I mean, this is a guy who I don’t think I’ve seen with a smile on his actual face.”

玛丽是一个公关公司的董事，她告诉我们那个给他发笑脸的客户是来自美国西海岸的房地产执行官，拥有名校的MBA学位，是一个平时作风一丝不苟的商人。“我和他打了7年交道，今天在讨论自动售货机问题时，他突然在来信的末尾加了一个笑脸。我很惊讶，他可是一个从来不苟言笑的人啊。”

Ms. DiNardo joins the ranks of professionals who have found themselves on the receiving end of smileys, winks and LOL’s, as the emoticon has rather suddenly migrated from the e-mails and texts of teenagers (and perhaps the more frothy adults) to the correspondence of business people who pride themselves on their gravitas.

玛丽小姐只是最近越来越容易收到笑脸、眨眼、大笑等符号的一个普通白领人士。在邮件或短信的末尾附上一个笑脸的习惯正在从青少年向商业白领转移。

“Oh, no question, I’ve been sending and receiving them more often,” said Martha Heller, president of Heller Search Associates, a search firm for technology executives for Fortune 500 companies. “Generally I’ll use a smiley or a wink when I’m indicating that my previous comment was meant to be a joke. Like, I hired a guy who’s head of sales and marketing to launch my company into the wonderful world of social media, and I sent him a note — ‘I hear there’s this thing called Twitter’ — and I added the smiley so he knew I wasn’t that clueless.”

“哦，确实是这样，我们最近越来越频繁的收到这些符号”，来自专门为世界五百强公司提供搜索服务的海伦说，“通常情况下，我会使用一个笑脸或者眨眼符号表示我之前的话是个玩笑，例如我曾经雇佣了一个负责销售和市场的员工让他开启我们在社会化媒体中的新业务，我发给他一个消息‘我听说过有个网站叫Twitter’，并且加上一个笑脸，呵呵，表示其实我没有那么孤陋寡闻。”

Lisa M. Bates, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Columbia, has lately embraced the smiley — as have her academic colleagues, albeit “sparingly and strategically,” she said. “Basically, I’m often sarcastic and in a hurry, and a well-planted smiley face can take the edge off and avoid misunderstanding,” Dr. Bates wrote in an e-mail. “I figure they have saved me some grief from misconstrued tone many times.”

丽萨 贝茨，哥伦布大学的助理教授，最近也很痴迷于使用笑脸——她有一帮呆板而严谨的同事，说“我做事经常风风火火，这样我加一个笑脸上去就可以缓和同事间的关系了，可以避免相互误解。”,"以前,我曾经因为他们误解了我的意思而导致我伤害了他们"。

Emoticons can produce another layer of confusion, however: they don’t always read the same way across different technical interfaces. “In the text function of my BlackBerry there is a sidebar menu of emoticons (how ridiculous is that?) that shows the yellow smiley faces, except they are also crying and raging, and winking and blowing kisses, etc.,” Dr. Bates wrote. “I sent a fairly new acquaintance a ‘big hug’ emoticon — which, for the record, was ironic. But anyway, on his iPhone it came up with the symbols, not the smiley face, which don’t look anything like a big hug. From his perspective they look like a view of, er, splayed lady parts: ({}).“He then ran around his lab showing colleagues excitedly what I had just sent him. Half (mostly men) concurred with his interpretation, and the others (mostly women) didn’t and probably thought he was kind of a desperate perv.”

表情也很容易产生其他误解，往往是由于发送终端的不一致而造成的。“我使用黑莓手机的文字编辑功能，在菜单栏里可以选择表情（多可笑啊？！），那里列出了一堆黄色的笑脸，另外也有咆哮、眨眼、飞吻等符号”，贝茨博士写到，“我以前给一个刚来的新同事发了一个‘拥抱’的表情，在我的手机上是图标，但在他的iPhone上却显示为符号，那个符号不再像一个拥抱了。从他手机上看，更像一个女士身体的某个部位：({})，他到处拿着手机给他的同事们看我刚发的短信，半数的人（大多是男士）赞同他的理解，其他的人（多是女士）不赞同，认为他是一个饥渴的家伙。”

These little misinterpretations aside, recent adoptees like Dr. Bates and Ms. Heller said that emoticons not only signal intention in a medium where it’s notoriously hard to read tone, they also denote a special congenial relationship between sender and recipient. “I see it as a relationship-building exercise,” Ms. Heller said.

除过这些小小的误解，贝茨博士和海伦夫人说那些符号不仅是一个表示一种难以启齿的情绪借代物，它们同样表示了发送者和接受者之间特殊的适意关系。“我把它当做一个维护人与人关系的纽带”，海伦夫人这样认为。

Students of digital communication see the emerging acceptance of whimsical signifiers as inevitable, if not always desirable. “They’re part of the degradation of writing skills — grammar, syntax, sentence structure, even penmanship — that come with digital technology,” said Bill Lancaster, a lecturer in communications at Northeastern University in Boston. “Certainly I understand the need for clarity. But language, used properly, is clear on its own.”

信息时代的学生认为越来越多的使用这样异想天开的符号是一种必然，然而并不一定可取。“它表现了人们写作水平的退化——语法、句法、句子结构、甚至书写——它们是来自数字时代的”，波士顿东北大学的比尔在一堂关于交流的课上说，“我当然知道简洁的必要性，但是语言如果使用恰当的话，是可以表达清楚各种意思的。”

Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that writers and teachers of writing are among the last emoticon holdouts. “I am deeply offended by them,” said Maria McErlane, a British journalist, actress and radio personality on BBC Radio 2. “If anybody on Facebook sends me a message with a little smiley-frowny face or a little sunshine with glasses on them, I will de-friend them. I also de-friend for OMG and LOL. They get no second chance. I find it lazy. Are your words not enough? To use a little picture with sunglasses on it to let you know how you’re feeling is beyond ridiculous.”

也许并不奇怪，作家和教写作的老师们是最反对使用符号语言的。“我对那些东西深恶痛绝”，来自英国的记者，供职于BBS广播2台的玛丽说，“如果Facebook上有人敢给我发带笑脸的消息的话，我就要和他绝交，我同样对OMG或者LOL这样的缩写表示深恶痛绝。他们这样做的话，我不会给他们留半点情面的。是你的词汇量不够吗？用一些笑脸符号来表示你的无聊！”

Another harsh critic is Michele Farinet, a parent coordinator in an elementary school in Manhattan who spends much of her days answering and responding to e-mails of the (largely professional) body of parents. The whole subject touches a raw nerve.

另外一些犀利的反对来自于福兰特，她是一所小学的家长合作部员工。福兰特每天要回答和回复大量孩子家长们发来的邮件。这个话题触动了她的神经。

“To me, it’s like bad moviemaking, where as soon as Dad grabs the puppy, the shot immediately goes to Junior’s teary face — like the director does not trust the audience to have an appropriately developed emotion by itself,” Ms. Farinet wrote in an e-mail. “That’s what emoticons do. PLEASE don’t ‘show’ me that I should be happy-faced or sad-faced or that you are sad-faced or happy-faced.

“在我看来，它更像是一个失败的电影制作。就像是当爸爸抓到小狗之后，镜头立即切换到儿子的笑脸上——导演似乎认为观众们不会自发的产生相应的喜悦感情一样”，福兰特在一封电子邮件里写道，“这些表情符号正是这样的。请不要告诉我我该高兴还是该伤心。”

“Can you imagine,” wrote Ms. Farinet, “reading the end of ‘The Great Gatsby’like that?: So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past :-( ”

“你能想象”，福兰特接着说，“当你读到《了不起的盖茨比》的最后，碰见这样的文字：‘所以我们继续奋力前进，逆水行舟，不进则退:-(’”。