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The idea of codifying emotional content in written or message form is not new. The ''National Telegraphic Review and Operators Guide'' in April 1857 documented the use of the number 73 in Morse Code to express "love and kisses" (later reduced to the more formal "best regards"). ''Dodge's Manual'' in 1908 documented the reintroduction of "love and kisses" as the number 88. Gajadhar and Green comment that both Morse Code Abbreviations are more succinct than modern abbreviations such as LOL .12 In 1912 Ambrose Bierce proposed "an improvement in punctuation — the snigger point, or note of cachinnation: it is written thus \___/! and presents, as near as may be, a smiling mouth. It is to be appended, with the full stop, exclamation mark as Bierce's later example used to every jocular or ironical sentence".3 Emoticons had already come into use in sci-fi Fandom in the 1940s ,Gregory Benford, ''A Scientist's Notebook: NET@FANDOM.COM'', The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Vol. 90, No. 6 (June 1996), p. 90 although there seems to have been a lapse in cultural continuity between the communities. An early instance of using text characters to represent a sideways smiling (and frowning) face occurred in an ad for the MGM movie '' Lili '' in the '' New York Herald Tribune '', March 10, 1953, page 20, cols. 4-6. (See "Creation of :-) and :-(" section below.) In 1963, the "smiley face", a yellow button with two black dots representing eyes and an upturned thick curve representing mouth, was created by freelance artist Harvey Ball . It was realized on order of a large insurance company as part of a campaign to bolster the morale of its employees and soon became a big hit. This smiley presumably inspired many later emoticons; the most basic graphic emoticon depicts in fact a small, yellow, smiley face. In a New York Times interview in April 1969, Alden Whitman asked writer Vladimir Nabokov : "How do you rank yourself among writers (living) and of the immediate past?" Nabokov answered: "I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile — some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket, which I would now like to trace in reply to your question." 4 Proto-emoticons The earliest known non- ASCII emoticons were used in the PLATO IV program as early as 1972, which allowed users to type multiple text characters on top of each other. Many combinations of ordinary text characters were known to produce face-like patterns, which were used as emoticons. Several Internet websites —such as . The idea was to indicate Tongue-in-cheek — the Hyphen represented a tongue, not a nose. Although it has two out of the three characters of ":-)", its intended interpretation was different and it does not appear to have inspired the later smileys. Creation of :-) and :-( The creator of the original , from old backup tapes.See Fahlman's website for a reconstruction of the entire thread Web usage In Web Forum s and Instant Messengers , text emoticons are often automatically replaced with small corresponding images, which came to be called ''emoticons'' as well. Similarly, in some versions of Microsoft Word , the Auto Correct feature replaces basic smileys such as :) and :( with a single smiley-like character. Originally, these image emoticons were fairly simple and replaced only the most straightforward and common character sequences, but over time they became so complex that the more specialized emoticons are often input using a menu or popup windows, sometimes listing hundreds of items. Some of these graphical emoticons do not actually represent faces or emotions; for example, an "emoticon" showing a guitar might be used to represent music. Further, some instant messaging software is designed to play a sound upon receiving certain emoticons. An August 2004 issue of the ''Risks Digest'' (''comp.risks'' on USENET ) pointed out a problem with such features which are not under the sender's control: :It's hard to know in advance what character-strings will be parsed into what kind of unintended image. A colleague was discussing his 401(k) plan with his boss, who happens to be female, via instant messaging. He discovered, to his horror, that the boss's instant-messaging client was rendering the "(k)" as a big pair of red smoochy lips.5 Emoticons are also commonly used in online computer games. WESTERN STYLE Traditionally, the emoticon in Western style is written from left to right, the way one reads and writes in most Western cultures. Thus, most commonly, you'll see the eyes on the left, followed by the nose and mouth. To more easily recognise them, tilt your head toward your left shoulder (or occasionally toward your right shoulder if the "top" of the emoticon is toward the right). Common examples A list of some of the most common emoticons follows. As displayed here, they all use a relatively consistent form, but each of them can also be transformed by being rotated, having the hyphen omitted, and so on (see Variation below). More comprehensive lists may be found under External Links below. : : : : : : Variation There are endless possibilities because people are very good at creating and interpreting pictures as faces. See ASCII Art . An equal sign is often used for the eyes in place of the colon, without changing the meaning of the emoticon. In these instances, the hyphen is almost always either omitted or, occasionally, replaced with an 'o' as in =O). Lately it has become common to omit the hyphen, whether a colon or an equal sign is used for the eyes {Link without Title} . In general, similar-looking characters are commonly substituted for one another: for instance, o, O, and 0 can all be used interchangeably, sometimes for subtly different effect. A few people turn the smiley around, a "left handed" smiley (: This left-handed smiley can sometimes cause miscommunication though, since some hardcore net addicts tend to drop the : representing the eyes ) instead of :) so what was intended to be a smile could be interpreted as a frown. Some variants are also more common in certain countries because of reasons like Keyboard Layout s, for example the smiley =) is common in Scandinavia and Finland where the keys for = and ) are placed right beside each other and both need the use of the Shift Key . There also exists the use of Umlaut s to achieve emoticons that aren't tilted to the side. For example, Ö is the upright version of :O (meaning that one is surprised). As more of a joke than anything – but also as a political statement – "frownies", the symbol :-( were trademarked by Despair, Inc. in ''U.S. Trademark Serial No. 75502288, Registration No. 2347676''. The trademark applies only to "Printed matter namely, greeting cards, posters and art prints". In January 2001 Despair issued a satirical press release in which it was announced that the company would be suing "over 7 million internet users" who had infringed their trademark. They subsequently issued another press release a month later in response to the reaction their claim had generated. XD (used to represent laughing) supposedly became popular on the internet shortly after it was used in the television show, '' South Park '', usually explained to the unknowing as the emoticon being akin to the animation method used when a character was laughing so hard they had their eyes closed (a sideways X for their eyes). Posture emoticons |
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