Punctuation and Emoticons

So you know how people use punctuation to make smiley faces all the time, like so :), etc? It drives me nuts, in an academic sort of way. The other morning I was sitting in bed and thinking about why I hate punctuation smileys. My conclusion was, it's an abuse of the purpose of punctuation. Then I thought about it more. Here is what I thought:
Punctuation was originally invented in order to dictate pause length and breath location to the reader, who naturally was reading out loud, so that he might properly express the intent of the author. If one breathes in the wrong places, or pauses too long, then it disturbs the rhetorical effect, and the oratorical value must be preserved. Honestly, one can't appreciate a stunning speech of Cicero properly if the pauses are done wrong. Have you ever heard somebody reading aloud and they paused in the middle of a clause? Well, maybe you don't notice. It's probably because you have a more charitable soul than me; or just don't care. Anyway, I notice. It drives me crazy. Because that's what the punctuation is for. It tells the reader where to pause and breath so that the ideas are accurately expressed.
This is what I was thinking. Then I thought, oh dear, because punctuation smileys are, in effect, doing the same thing: ensuring that the reader properly understands the intent of the author. In other words, by my own argument, I have no grounds for hating them.
But I do.

Figures

Last night I dreamed I lived in an apartment near where I used to live, but to get in I had to go through an extremely narrow door in a tree, and when the area flooded I was relieved that my apartment was high enough up that it wouldn't flood, despite the fact that it was evidently underground. I was also friends with a young Asian man who was the hero of the world, and he'd been so busy being a hero that we hadn't seen each other for months and were excited when we got to collect the garbage on campus together. I also ran into a familiar tall blond man I don't know who told me about how they were finally making all the Bolivians be baptized Catholic so they would quit their rebellion, and that the Bolivians who'd been forced to be Catholic were called 'Nolos'. It wasn't until after I'd been considering the oddities of my dream for a while that what is possibly the most bizarre part occurred to me. 'Nolo' is a Latin word which means 'I am not willing'. Apparently even while I'm in middle of entirely irrational dreams, I can't help but have decent Latin.