Nabokov and gaudy graphic smiles

Text or graphic, perhaps the subtelities of writing should not be sabotaged by blatant smile symbols. For what purpose does it serve other than to undermine finely crafted textual utterances? If the meaning of a sentence lends itself to a smile, is it necessary?

The graphic smile is a pet peeve of mine (particularly when software writers assume that you would want all your textual smiles substituted automatically.)

The text version; however, is something that harkens back to the early days of networks. The first time I came across these crude smiles was in an early nineties Amiga Shopper (a now defunct computer magazine) issue about modems and bulletin board systems.

The simple colon-dash-closed parenthesis smile has a certain charm and subtle eloquence in and of itself that maybe, just maybe, it could be taken as emphasising or doubling the smile, wry or not, inherent in a sentence. Or perhaps it’s a sentence all by itself, perhaps:

The following is from a 1969 interview in the New York Times with Vladimir Nabokov.

Q: How do you rank yourself among writers (living) and of the immediate past?

Nabokov: I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile – some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket, which I would now like to trace in reply to your question.

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