What's Mallard raving about today?
Email, Emoticons.
Mallard has found that, somehow, his racist Emails followed by a winky emoticon have not been fully understood as just a joke, because some of his best friends are black, don't you know.
In other news, ordinary folks deserve a break, not a lecture.
6 comments:
Nooooo, Mallard...that means they're winking at you. Or laughing. Just like people do in person, in real life.
Haven't we seen this strip--or one almost exactly like it--before?
Batshit's doing two things here: trying to impress us his knowledge of "big" words like "semiotics," and trying to sow discord ("If someone writes 'LOL,' they're really calling you an asshole!").
He's failing miserably at both, but hey, what's new?
LOL ;)
Tinshley hates emoticons because it's hard to turn your head sideways to read them without falling over after he'd had fourteen beers (i.e., breakfast).
If that's true, why isn't the last panel of every Dullard a giant "LOL"?
Today's "comic" is just wrong on the facts. Sometimes (as @Tog points out) emoticons are expressions of emotion ... people who are mentally healthy have emotions and express them, which can be difficult for Mallard Fillmore to appreciate.
Otherwise ... and this can be *very* hard for conservatives to understand ... natural language is ambiguous. It's not "designed" like a computer language, so statements can be difficult to interpret, for which emoticons and so forth are helpful and appropriate
Indeed, the people who have the most trouble understanding this are the stupid ones; people who can think of only one meaning to a sentence are, generally speaking, lacking in intelligence. So today's comic is a total FAIL from a factual standpoint.
It's also insulting the vast majority of internet users, which may not concern Mallard since, frankly, most of them don't know he exists and most of those who stumble across him swiftly conclude he's a waste of time. There is so much creativity and humor out there, and only 24 hours in a day LOL!
(P.S. Brewsky? That LOL was for you!)
Emoticons are used because it is hard to impossible to put inflection in text. Subtleties like sarcasm can be lost, especially when texting with people who do not know you very well, and are not used to how you talk and make jokes.
Unless your Mallard, then it just defaults to a persecution complex.
Oops! Forgot to make a joke!" LOL
;-)
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