This paper attempts to show how young Japanese women effectively construct and manipulate their emotive stances through the use of special pictorial signs and their graph(em)ic modifications in casual letter writing among friends. To achieve this, the writers use a para-/metalinguistic and indexical means of 'contextualization' for the socio-cultural mediation of affect and textual awareness. At the same time, they rely on a cognitive mechanism equivalent to 'semantic reduction,' a phenomenon widely observed in grammaticalization processes.