• Sergio@slrpnk.net
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    3 days ago

    WE DO NOT SMILE IN GERMANY

    eh… just find a German who’s old enough, and tell them: 7-1.

  • ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works
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    3 days ago

    I was a new grad student at a gathering organized to introduce us to the department, and I was drinking a hard lemonade. The department head walked up to me and said, with a strong German accent:

    In Germany, zat would be illegal.

    I thought she was just giving me a hard time about drinking the lemonade rather than a real beer, but then I looked it up and the lemonade would in fact have been illegal in Germany. (Or rather it would have been illegal when she was growing up there. It was legalized since then.)

  • Dharma Curious (he/him)@slrpnk.net
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    3 days ago

    Honestly, we should be adapting more non English letters into our emoticons. Ü and ö are great examples, but :þ or :Þ looks way more like a tongue sticking out than :p does (though, I said non English, and þorn is, technically, an English letter…

    Ÿ could be something… I’m not sure what, but something. Potentially pornographic…

    ẞ or ß could be some kind of sideways boobs… Maybe an ass?

    ð could be eyes if doubled ð.ð sunglasses: ð-ð

    Ð could be gap-toothed smiley. =Ð nerd smiley: 8Ð

    There are others, but I only have English, Esperanto, and Icelandic installed right now.

    Esperanto has letters with little hats. Ĵ makes a nice little umbrella.

  • bdot@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    in all seriousness, it’s likely because the origin of the emoticon is tied in with the ASCII character set, and the codes available when the emoticon was conceived. emoticons were around for decades, before we started using them on phones.

    in fact, “smilies” are indeed not German!!!

    • Ephera@lemmy.ml
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      3 days ago

      Eh, I feel like we would’ve adopted our own style by now. For example, this face ^^ was fairly popular in the German internet before mobile phones and emojis took over, because it’s just two key presses on the German keyboard.

      I think, the main problem is simply that umlauts look like letters to us. If someone types a random Ü or Ö after their sentence, you might think they meant to write another sentence. Or you simply do not register that it’s supposed to resemble a face, because it’s just a letter in your mind. Much like you presumably don’t either look at an E and think that it looks like a rake, because the association with the letter is much stronger.