Are the Eyes the Gate to the Emoticon's Soul???

Here's something that I prolly shouldn't reveal about myself; emoticons amuse me.

Today, if you AIMed me, you'd get monkey emoticons...yesterday, skullz. I'm not saying they're cool. I'm saying, I DIG EM!! I want to be careful about saying that because that doesn't mean I want sheets of emoticon stickers or emoticon t-shirts or any of that crap. I only like them in cyberform.

Earlier I read this about Asian emoticons, and it blew my mind:

"Users from East Asia popularized a style of emoticons that can be understood without turning one's head to the left.

These emoticons are usually found in a format similar to (*_*), where the asterisks indicate the eyes, the central character, usually an underscore, the mouth, and the parentheses, the outline of the face. A large number of different characters can be used to replace the eyes, which usually is where the emoticon derives its emotive aspect (contrasting the Western emoticons' emoting through the mouth). The emphasis on the eyes is reflected in the common usage of emoticons that use only the eyes, e.g. ^^. Characters like hyphens or periods can replace the underscore; the period is often used for a smaller, "cuter" mouth or to represent a nose, e.g. (^.^). Alternatively, the mouth/nose can be left out entirely, e.g. (^^). The parentheses also can often be replaced with braces, e.g. {^_^}. Many times, the parentheses are left out completely, e.g. ^^ or o_O or <.<;; A quotation mark ", apostrophe ', or semicolon ; can be added to the emoticon to imply apprehension or embarrassment, in the same way as the anime sweat drop. Many other characters can be appended to also indicate arms or hands, e.g. <(^_^)> or ⊂( ﾟ ヮﾟ)⊃ or <(--<)" from wikipedia



(click on the image for a better view)

( '_' ) Whoa. That totally just freaked my establishment.