Emoticons are a form of informal punctuation, akin to the more formal exclamatory (!) and interrogative (?) punctuation marks. Although they are not yet suitable for formal written works, there is nothing wrong—assuming that, like the em dash, they are used sparingly—in sprinkling them into electronic textual communications.

So as much as I love Carl Trueman’s work as a theologian and cultural gadfly, I have to take issue with Carl Truman as grammar schoolmarm. Herein is a reply to his Emoticonoclasm:

1. Real men don’t worry about what people think of their punctuation.

2. People who have a decent command of the English language and are able to express themselves using those old fashioned things, words and sentences and punctuation marks, can sometimes have a need, for clarity’s sake, of emoticons — especially those permanently restricted by force of habit to only 120 characters. It’s not a matter of working harder. We have a great language, but meanings are often ambiguous. Those who rail against emoticons are part of the increasing intellectual fustiness of the church.

3. Railing against emotions represent a regression to a modernist theology of communication whereby arbitrary grammar rules trump effective discourse.

4. As I said earlier, real men don’t care if someone uses a “just kidding” emoticon [ ; ) ] on their Facebook status or Twitter feed. Hard to stress that one enough.

5. As for the intent in which I hope this post will be taken, all I can say is: ; )

Apparently, we Calvinists have a rather blinkered worldview:

The attentional blink is another of those weird and wonderful cognitive blind spots with which the human race is afflicted. Flash up two images in close succession, and we find it really difficult to even notice the second, let alone figure out what it is. That’s basically because our brains are still engaged in processing the first one.

In another recent study by Lorenzo Colzato . . . atheists and Dutch Christian Calvinists have had their attentional blinks assessed.

Lorenzo found that the atheists she tested had a shorter attentional blink than the Calvinists. In fact, as the figure shows, there actually seems to be a fairly direct relationship between how often the people in her study prayed, and the length of their attentional blink.

She thinks that this is related to her earlier finding (that Calvinists are ‘detail’ people rather than ‘big picture’ people). Calvinists are trained from birth to focus on a narrower, rather than a bigger context, and Lorenzo thinks that this have widespread effects on their style of information processing – when compared to individuals who are raised with a broader, more complex worldview (including religious people).

(Via: Big Questions Online)