Thursday, May 24, 2007

The Better Bow Emoticon

I was logging into aol the other day, and while my mail page was loading, I was treated an to emoticon (one of those little smiley faces people put in their emails, like :-] and so forth). I guess this is aol's idea of educating us on the latest, greatest variants of these curious little combinations of typography. Whatever the case, it got me thinking: Why not a bow tie emoticon? I did a little tinkering, and came up with this:

;-) }{


(You can adjust the smile and wink to suit your mood...)

A bit of research uncovered that variants of :-)8 and :-)X are already in use, but I'll remain steadfast in my defense of the braces (a.k.a. "curly brackets") that I've used as exhibiting more of the panache synonymous with Beau Ties Guys. Anyway, it seems like it could be a great sort of "secret handshake" for all of us Beau Ties Guys to use in our email correspondence.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm partial to >< for a bow tie; the curly braces don't seem to meet most of the time (and I use one for my moustache.)

B^{)#><

Is that a jumbo Banaga you're wearing below?

Bow Tie Bill said...

htom-

The use of keystroke symbols as graphic illustrations has opened up a whole new dimension for me as I look at my keyboard. I agree that the curlicue makes a great top half of a mustache, but since (a) I don't have one, and (b) I wear the so-called jumbo bow ties, it seemed like a closer approximation to my actual appearance. And I guess I also eliminated the >< from consideration because it wasn't oriented the same way as the rest of my carefully constructed artistic rendering!

And yes, that is a Bananga that I was wearing in my aviator-glasses post. That has been one of my recent favorites, although my wife will tell you that with all the great fabrics we have around to choose from, I use the term "favorite" very loosely. I am drawn to it I think partly because of its black background, which we rarely find in paisleys, and partly because of its--dare I say it?--neon colorations, which we have never before found!

Anonymous said...

There is the unicode character ⋈ U022C8 ⋈ but it runs the wrong way for use in a western smilie and I can't find one turned.

U02A48, Union above Bar above Intersection (or ⩈), would seem to be almost as good, but browsers don't render it correctly and turn it into a box or question mark.

I'll consult with Spice and have an order in later. Thanks!