I dreamed of emoticons all night. At one point, I heard Noelle
Cleary marveling, "Who would've thought we'd someday be expressing
moods with colons, semicolons, and parentheses?" (just as she did in
THE ART AND POWER OF BEING A LADY). Then I heard Nancy Kress
saying that "Although the semicolon will never replace 'I love you' as
a means of stirring readers' feelings, punctuation nonetheless has a
useful role to play in indicating emotion," just as she discussed in
WRITE GREAT FICTION.