Left to Right

I am a writer. I like words. I'm not a big fan of emoticons, though I do occasionally employ a traditional smiley face. The noseless one. So it looks more like the old-fashioned, yellow-circle, "Have a Nice Day" emblem.  :)

Whenever I come across an emoticon, I always tilt my head to the left so I can see it in a more upright presentation. Because most of the time I can't figure out what those odd combinations of punctuation marks are supposed to look like. Because they're perpendicular to everything else on the page, for Pete's sake!

Anyway. Recently I started coming across one -- mostly in comments on blog posts -- that I could not decipher. I even went to the Wikipedia List of Emoticons for help, but no luck, it wasn't there.

The first character in the mystery emoticon was < and the only face on the list that had a hat like that was supposed to mean "dumb or dunce-like" -- which I though was kind of a rude reply to an entertaining blog post, especially considering the second character was a 3, which I thought looked like boobs, and when you put the two together the face would be a what? A dumb bimbo? Nice. Except there were no eyes. Whatever. I shrugged and let it go.

But it kept popping up, and I kept thinking, What the hell? And then tonight I was reading replies to a Bloggess post, and these people kept putting the Dumb Bimbo emoticon in their comments on a touching post about depression, and I was feeling frustrated, left out and stupid because I couldn't understand their language, and then all of a sudden, something across the room caught my attention and I tilted my head to the right and -- voila! There it was! I finally got it!

And all I could think was: What user of the English language would create something that had to be read Right to Left when the rest of the sentence went Left to Right??

Some emoticon junkie, apparently.

<3

(Yes, I now know it's a heart, and I realize that probably the majority of Web users know it's a heart, but I still think it looks more like an ice cream cone. Or a halter top. Depending on how you tilt your head.)