Irony does not travel well over the internet. One should always use a smiley 
Peter wrote:
Irony does not travel well over the internet. One should always use a smiley
I did!
Oh yes, OK. Maybe the graphical smiley works better
JasonC wrote:
Peter wrote: Irony does not travel well over the internet. One should always use a smiley
I did!
Robin_253 did not. But after contemplating his name and his stated motivation for calling fabric/wood planes dangerous, I have come to the conclusion that he may be serious about bringing the message out, but he actually means exactly the opposite. Him not using a smiley had me read his post several times before it dawned on me. A smiley would have been a kind of spoiler …
One of the (several) reasons I got kicked off the Socata owners’ group was because I enjoyed leaving out smilies, to see who falls for it
Once I wrote that I fly 30% over MTOW because the resulting useful increase in Va makes the plane flyable faster in turbulence.
Peter wrote:
Irony does not travel well over the internet
It certainly doesn’t travel to Belgium! Sorry Jan.
How did people use irony before smileys existed???
I suppose they didn’t use it at all, kinda like navigating without a GPS (something we all know is an impossibility).
The internet didn’t exist before smileys, and vice versa
People used to write letters, usually carefully, and walk to the letter box with them. A month later you got a reply – or not if you said something “wrong” (or the recipient was good at reading between the lines).
Or you made a phone call.
Today, people sit behind keyboards and many do the same thing they do behind the steering wheel of a car. And I have just learnt there is a Skoda Yeti Appreciation Group.
Navigating without GPS is provably impossible – because I would immediately get lost without it.
Peter wrote:
The internet didn’t exist before smileys, and vice versa
Yes it did. And there were anyway other messaging and forum systems before the Internet. In fact, I used a Swedish forum system (KOM) running on several timesharing mainframe computers connected via DECnet starting in the late 1970s. The use of irony was a major concern and the recommendation was that people should explicity mark ironic comments with “Note irony”.
@Airborne_again
What a curious fact!!! (Note lack of irony).
So then how did pre-internet epistolaries make use of irony? Has the internet made people stupid? (Note use of irony—or perhaps its absence )
“Note irony” is a phrase that could have been dreamt up only by computer programmers!
