Purely textual communication–like email, txting, posting and IMing–could lead to even simple statements being easily misinterpreted. Thanks to emoticons, we can easily convey emotion or intent with common ASCII punctuation. While the smiley :-) is a fairly ubiquitous way to convey a pleasant mood or a statement with no malicious intent, many more moods and signifiers can be conveyed with the veritable language of emoticons using only one line of three or four characters.