{"id":60,"date":"2008-08-20T17:09:12","date_gmt":"2008-08-20T17:09:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp\/?p=60"},"modified":"2008-08-20T17:09:12","modified_gmt":"2008-08-20T17:09:12","slug":"personal_cultural_quandary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/2008\/08\/personal_cultural_quandary\/","title":{"rendered":"Personal Cultural Quandary"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"mt-enclosure mt-enclosure-image\" style=\"display: inline;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"sarcasm.jpg\" src=\"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/sarcasm.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" class=\"mt-image-right\" style=\"float: right; margin: 0 0 20px 20px;\" \/><\/span><\/p>\n<p>As you may have gathered, I&#8217;m sort of a sarcastic person. What can I say? I watched a lot of <i>M*A*S*H<\/i> 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&#8217;s just ignore that if you have to signal your jokes that blatantly, then maybe you shouldn&#8217;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 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newmusicbox.org\/about.nmbx#oteri\">Frank<\/a>&#8216;s answer raised the bar:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"webkit-indent-blockquote\" style=\"margin: 0 0 0 40px; border: none; padding: 0px;\"><p>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&#8217;m thinking of the development of Concrete Poetry by guys like Emmett Williams in the early &#8217;60s who in turn were doing stuff that had already been done by\u00c2\u00a0Kenneth 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&#8230;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote class=\"webkit-indent-blockquote\" style=\"margin: 0 0 0 40px; border: none; padding: 0px;\"><p><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Thanks, Frank. I&#8217;m feeling like less of a philistine already. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As you may have gathered, I&#8217;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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-60","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}