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An Undiscovered Punctuational Country

From an email exchange today:

In which case, I generally believe (albeit inconsistently ;) that a smiley also doubles as a closed parenthesis, thus avoiding the awkward:
(albeit inconsistently ;) )

Sadly, the Bluebook has remained silent upon this important issue.

Advice from my readers on this important issue is (as always :) welcome.

Comments

If you were to feed it through without closing the parenthetical I think you'd get a parsing error: Begin parenthetical -> item of interest -> smiley -> .... You have to close it! Otherwise it would be WRONG! Also, I recommend using hyphen noses in the smileys because you can't be sure of the display font and the face might end up too squished.
Like Cathy said, it's a matter of logic - you do need to close the expression. The ")" that is part of the smiley does not count as part of the closed expression since it is its own separate entity. Smileys do have noses. What does the Bluebook say about other instances of ASCII art? Such as the rose?
I'm going to join the side that says that it's cleaner, at least, to not "close the expression." Even if prescriptively we need the end parens, most of us will understand the dual role the lips of the smiley face play. I agree with Anthony here. Omit the final end parenthesis.
So a consensus view seems to be forming: no-nosed smileys can act as a closed parenthesis, but the "smileys have noses" faction think that they shouldn't. Maybe smileys with noses can't act as closed parenthesis?
I prefer a formulation like this [brackets work too ;)].

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