'Removes leading and trailing puncutation
Leaves contractions and most emoticons
Does not preserve punc-plus-letter emoticons (e.g. :D)'

def _words_and_emoticons(self):

    wes = self.text.split()
    words_punc_dict = self._words_plus_punc()
    wes = [we for we in wes if (len(we) > 1)]
    for (i, we) in enumerate(wes):
        if (we in words_punc_dict):
            wes[i] = words_punc_dict[we]
    return wes
