At Accardo, you'll save 25% on your first shop and get free delivery, which means if you were to buy a four cheese pizza, you'd basically be getting one of the cheeses for free. Save and splurge at Akado, the online supermarket. Deo graphical and other restrictions, min spend £60 on charge to apply, discount available on food, new customers only, max saving £20,000, terms at akado.com. You're listening to Away With Words. I'm Grant Barrett.

And I'm Martha Barnett.

I was writing some business correspondence recently in email, and I made a comment that I

thought was witty and charming.

But then I caught myself just in case adding a little smiley face.

But then I had to stop and think, wait, what am I doing?

This is business correspondence. I would never, ever put a smiley face in a printed letter. What

am I thinking? And then, Grant, that's when it hit me that in email correspondence, there's a kind

of boundary line. You know, there's a point that you may or may not reach where you feel comfortable

adding those little symbols in business correspondence.

You might call that point the rubicon of the emoticon, that point which you cross.

And there was actually an article in the New York Times about this recently by Judith Newman.

And she was noting that many people are saying more and more emoticons are creeping into my business correspondence.

Some people like it because it helps them communicate and other people just say it just makes their skin crawl.

And in fact, we put something on our Facebook page and, boy, we heard from the skin crawlers.

Yeah, most of the people on there said absolutely not.

Absolutely not.

Don't use that in correspondence with me. Right. I can see a small reason for it. If you do have a personal relationship that, I mean, you might sign your emails love or, you know, what if you work for your father or, you know, partners with your sister or something. Yeah, I don't know. There's a gradation there between formality and informality, and some workplaces are incredibly informal, right? Yeah, yeah, but I mean, if you're writing somebody you want money from or... Well, let the other person cross that Rubicon first, is what I say, right? As long as they're not using them, you shouldn't use them either. It feels significant, you know, when you get a smiley face from somebody who never smiles in person and all of a sudden there's one in your email, it's weird.

I do smile sometimes. It's weird. I remember your first smiley face you ever sent me, Grant. I thought our relationship had changed. It's true.

But I didn't put you on the Christmas card list. 8779-9-6673 or email Words at waywardradio.org. What do you think? Hello, you have a way with words. Hey, how you doing? This is Ryan. I'm in Camp Pillilson. Oh, wow. Great. Just down the road. What can we help you with? Well, I had a topic that I wanted to discuss. It was actually the rank of petty officer in the Navy. Uh-huh. Petty officer? Yeah, and basically, I've been in the Marines for 11 years now, and we call all of our enlisted in the rank of E4 to E9, non-commissioned officers. And basically what that means is that you have leadership, but you just don't have a commission.

In a Navy, they say petty officer.

Now, I served aboard three naval vessels wearing, you know, petty officers from the rank of first class

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