Personal Cultural Quandary

As you may have gathered, I'm sort of a sarcastic person. What can I say? I watched a lot of M*A*S*H as a kid, and it rubbed off. In personal email, this sets up a 21st-century quandary, because you want to make sure people get that your jokes are jokes without tone and facial cues (let's just ignore that if you have to signal your jokes that blatantly, then maybe you shouldn't be writing them). So recently I posed this question: Can a 30-year-old woman legitimately use emoticons to punctuate her emails? Yes, it was a stupid, 1 a.m. kind of discussion point, but Frank's answer raised the bar:

Emoticons are fine for any age especially since their origins significantly predate the rise of the internet, and indeed, the births of everyone on this email chain (myself included): I'm thinking of the development of Concrete Poetry by guys like Emmett Williams in the early '60s who in turn were doing stuff that had already been done by Kenneth Patchen and e.e.cummings, and before them the Dada-ists, and long before them some Medieval monks who created odd conglomerations of text and punctuation in their personal prayer books, but alas I digress...

Thanks, Frank. I'm feeling like less of a philistine already. :)