I’m perfectly fine being subjected to riducule when I innoculously ask my friends, "Hey – have you heard of this guy Kanye West?" eight months after he’s blown up on the pop culture scene. But I’m NOT okay not knowing the latest emoticons. Here are two I recently learned.
- <g> – This means "grin," apparently. I’ve only encountered two people in the whole world who use this emoticon instead of the more standard " 🙂 ". Beware of those Colorado people always trying to be different.
- <eom> – Ramit Sethi just used this on me again, to signal the end of a message when exchanging quick notes in the subject line of emails. In an earlier message I thought it meant the same as "<g>" or ":-)" but alas, after looking it up, Ramit is not smiling at me, he’s saying "I’m done, now leave me alone." Damn.
But I thought is more universal (reminds me of computer class, end-of-file). I use it when ideally I would have sent an IM, but not sure the other end will receive it; everything I want to say is in the title line and it’s bloody urgent. It’s more a courtesy (don’t bother opening the blank email)then “leave me alone” … at least IMHO (hm, an acronym )
Oops, my second paragraph above does not make sense without “< eom >“, but I did not use “” and Typepad probably thought it was an html tag:-)
Learn about it
I’m not actually old enough to know this on my own, but one of my co-workers was using it, and I asked her why.
I guess you could say that EOM is retro cool.