Arnold Zwicky's commentary on obcenicons - the symbols used to represent swear words - is definetly worth reading. He discusses why certain symbols appear to be unsuitable to replace words (i.e. the period (.) or the comma (,) or even parentesis). These punctuation marks just don't seem to express the emotion required. Exclamation points and question marks definitely do the trick !?!?!
1337 - or LEET - refers to "elite" meaning that those who use the language are superior than those who do not. This way of typing - specifically used by computer geeks - uses symbols to represent letters and thus create an interesting way to communicate, ( similar to emoticons, but much more sophisticated.)
Also on the gauntlet of symbol-created art is ASCII art, which creates entire pictures with an array of symbols. Check it out sometime - c'est tres cool!
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Kaitlyn M. Ulmer's word usage blog
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