^^

Telofy commented on the word ^^

Hello World.

I've had several discussions with friends about "^^". The point at issue is whether or not it ought to be separated from the text by a whitespace. Here some examples:

"It's over nine thousand!^^"

"It's over nine thousand! ^^"

Perhaps a special whitespace like a thin space would be appropriate.

Intuitively I used the space at first, but then I observed many other people omitting it and asked them which usage they deem correct. Until recently the outcome of my informal survey remained largely to the disfavor of the whitespace, but now I notice an increasing number of instances of deliberate use of the separating space.

Smilies are usually separated from the text, while punctuation marks are not. Personally I'm inclined to assign "^^" to the category of smilies, hence my initial use of whitespaces, but lacking solid arguments for my position I yielded to the seeming majority who omitted them.

Now I don't know anymore what to do or believe, please help!

Thanks in advance.

November 6, 2008

chained_bear commented on the word ^^

I think you'll have to tell me what the point is of including these symbols in the first place, before I can offer any opinions on whether there should be a space. :)

November 6, 2008

dontcry commented on the word ^^

Cat ears?

Raised eyebrows?

Twin peaks?

November 6, 2008

dontcry commented on the word ^^

The bottom half of two stick figure men?

November 6, 2008

Telofy commented on the word ^^

I usually interpreted them as raised eyebrows. There is a short mention on wikipedia. Perhaps I should statistically analyze chat logs. Later...

Sleep well, whenever that will be in your timezone.

November 6, 2008

shevek commented on the word ^^

It comes from anime facial expressions, which communicate smiling by narrowing the eyes. ^^ is more or less equivalent to :), but with a little less friendly, and a little more cute.

November 6, 2008

vanishedone commented on the word ^^

I've always taken ^^ to be an abbreviation of ^_^ (although they always remind me of nekomimi), which I would tend to set apart from the main text as I would other emoticons.

November 6, 2008

bilby commented on the word ^^

It's an indicator of stress levels. Anyone who is ^^ is obviously too tense.

November 6, 2008

pterodactyl commented on the word ^^

Yes! And anyone who is ^^^ is obviously three tense.

November 6, 2008

chained_bear commented on the word ^^

The version posted by VanishedOne is more commonly used, at least in my experience. Having two forms representing eyebrows without any eyes or other reference features doesn't work for me.

That said, if it's like a more traditional emoticon (who'd've ever put THOSE two words together??), I'd still put a space before it.

I like this o_0 better for indicating raised eyebrows.

November 7, 2008

Telofy commented on the word ^^

I seldom see ^_^, though I think it isn't uncommon either. But o_O and ^_^, it seems to me, represent two distinctly different emotions...

I'm currently downloading gigabytes of chat logs, so I can perhaps post some hard facts here by tomorrow. :-)

November 7, 2008

Telofy commented on the word ^^

I've started evaluating the chat log data. The current release can be found here: http://yu-shin.de/foo/evaluation.pdf

As stated in the document, newer versions will probably just overwrite the document (for reasons of laziness). Be warned.

And enjoy your reduplicated circumflexes.

November 7, 2008