The emoticon …
:-P
… represents “sticking out tongue,” “tongue sticking out,” “tongue hanging out in anticipation,” “Kitty with tongue hanging out,” “tongue sticking out: joke or sarcasm“
(Strictly speaking, I’m conflating emoticons/smileys here. Apologies to you purists.)
The Yahoo! IM version of this has a happy, sassy, giggly tongue-stick-out, as if saying, “I stick out my tongue at you, nyah!”
The MSN IM version of it is sort of goofy, as if saying, “My tongue is sticking out because I am silly.” Though it’s described as “Tongue out.”
and …
Well, you get the picture. Hopelessly muddled. And I’d had the impression from some quarters that they were using it as a “this makes me feel kind of sick” emoticon, which isn’t cited in any of the above. Which is a shame, because that’s how I was using it for a bit, but now I see I may have been sending the wrong message. Swell.
Of course, there’s always the emoticon …
:-x
That means, depending on who you ask, “I shouldn’t have said that,” “Big Wet Kiss,” “a big wet kiss” (or “kiss kiss” if lower case), or “My lips are sealed; or a kiss” (reversed if lower case)
MSN IM doesn’t directly support this smiley (in v.6), though it does use “(k)” to create its kissing lips emoticon. (Typical of MS to eschew even loose standards …)
Yahoo! IM translates that text into a little emoticon with a smile and a heart, labelled, “in love.” Again, a subtle difference.
Obviously, getting this one straight with whomever you might be using it with is pretty important. “I love you [I shouldn’t have said that.]” or “Our love is undying [my lips are sealed]” is kind of a mixed message, as is, “We need to keep this matter between us [big wet kiss].”
(Note that
:-*
is also sometimes use for kissing. Or, alternately, for “oops.” Again, the possibilities of miscommunication are endless.)
Feh.
The whole emoticon/smiley thing has gotten so wildly out of control, it’s ludicrous. The major IM clients all have eleventy-dozen pictures that are only accepted within their own systems, or have distinct differences in the “body language” they produce. And you can buy additional ones, too, that are even more bizarre. On the smiley (text) side of things, folks have exercised their imagination beyond any reason of anything they might want to communicate, let alone anything that anyone would recognize even in-context. I mean, an emoticon for “Jim Carrey”? For “a snake”? For “is naked”?
(Google is, so far, a noteworthy exception to this, and that’s almost enough on principle to suggest its universal adoption. People can still type in text smileys, but at least Google Talk doesn’t then translate them into its own pictures but simply presents them, bolded, for the reader to misinterpret.)
The point of emoticons was to convey clarifying emotion/info beyond the typed word. It sure sounds to me that for anything beyond a smile (and even that is open to interpretation — is that a “happy” smile, or a “primate bearing teeth” smile?), it’s not doing much to clarify things.