if you've just come from a seminar on punctuation in medieval manuscripts and early printed texts, by one of the greatest scholarly minds of our age, and it made you think of muppets....
clearly this just happened to me, so here's how i made the connection. sometimes punctuation is grammatical, but other times it guides a reader on how to interpret a text when reading it aloud/performing it. someone wished we had more punctuation marks, because the exclamation point is so forceful there's nothing in between. someone else mentioned emoticons beginning to serve that function.
so i realized that MC emoticons have THREE functions:
1) as punctuation to guide reader interpretation (if you go by the labels you see when you roll the mouse over the icon selection tray): yikes
2) literally the name of the character depicted: my favorite frog is
3) as some other facet of the muppet's personality: and i am cute, too