Barry's Beef

Who on Earth was the first moron to think a colon, a hyphen and a right bracket makes a smile? This is certainly a new inclusion into Room 101 however, at this point, I must make clear that I don't mind text speak. You know when some hip cat types gr8 instead of great, or urs instead of yours. These are examples of time-saving (and character saving) measures. My problem is with people who add an emotion presumably because they think that standing alone their statement might be misinterpreted. Culprits include Gutbuster who today sent an email consisting of :-) Another culprit would be McDonnell's mate himself, Cllr Kezza Cross who takes pleasure in plastering his blog with such inanities as the smile, the coyly deployed wink ;-) and his personal favourite the concerned eek :-/
Other points of annoyance would be the overuse of the exclamation mark!!!!!!!!! If you actually spoke like this, you'd actually end up speaking like Barry Scott! Off the Cilit Bang adverts!
And how about the stupid anachronyms? LOL! Are they really laughing out loud when they type? It gets dafter. PMSL! Pissing myself laughing. That's actually disgusting and my favourite (least favourite) ROFL! Rolling around the floor laughing. This would certainly make typing more challenging. People are patently lying.