[lit-ideas] Re: Naked Gentlemen

In this era of everyone stripping off for charity--gardener's clubs, Finnish Actor's Widows, The Nepalese Liberation Army Gun and Bun Fund (everyone seems to see quite old flesh as a kind of gold mine)-- the title is fair game. (I thought "The Tourist Heart" was pretty good, but no one responded to that post so maybe I was wrong. I shall be sure to recycle the title when the right project arises.)

The reason for calling this post, "Naked Gentlemen" is that Mike Geary's interesting question could get lost in a thread about the NYT.

"How does one make it known that a joke is intended?" is not a small issue in e-mail. One can do things with tone and vocabulary, or establish a reputation as a joker, but what if the urge to be funny comes but rarely? On the other side of the equation, I have found that the chief problem with writing funny stuff is that people assume everything you write is some sort of joke. Feste is not allowed to be serious.

I think Eric's fictional suggestion--when he wrote of code-- that there could be some e-mail signal equivalent to an eye twinkle, had merit. Would color do it, I wonder? Could responses that were intended to be humorous be in, say, blue? This wouldn't give away anything more than the twinkle does. It would allow us to relax though, knowing that someone who seemed trustworthy hasn't turned into a nettle-sucking fiend.

Do all computers now register color?

David Ritchie
Portland, Oregon
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