2. This summer, Facebook rolled out "stickers" on
its website: cartoony takes on the emoticon
for users to post in their chats, from a love-
struck cactus to a pizza-eating cat. Still, for
many of us, the simple sideways smiley face
still reigns in electronic communication.
3. It started 31 years ago, when a joke about a
fake mercury spill at Carnegie Mellon
University was posted on a digital message
board and mistaken for a genuine safety
warning. The board's users cast about for a
means to distinguish humorous posts from
serious content. On Sept. 19, 1982, faculty
member Scott E. Fahlman entered the debate
with the following message:
4. I propose that [sic] the following character
sequence for joke markers:
:-)
Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more
economical to mark things that are NOT jokes,
given current trends. For this, use:
:-(
5. The rest is Internet history. Dr. Fahlman's
expressive, minimal icons became an integral
part of online communication, if not always a
welcome one. These "smileys," as they came
to be known, were effectively the first online
irony marks. But emoticons recur throughout
modern history.
6. Though it is difficult to nail down the first
appearance in print, one likely contender
appears in an 1862 transcript of a speech by
President Abraham Lincoln. The transcript
records the audience's response to Lincoln's
droll introduction as "(applause and
laughter ;)." Without corroborating evidence,
however, it is impossible to decide whether
this is a true emoticon.
7. Counting in its favor, the transcript was
typeset by hand, before mechanical
typesetting brought with it the risk of
gummed-up Linotypes accidentally transposing
characters. So it is plausible that ";)"—rather
than the more grammatically sensible ");"—
was intentional. Moreover, later audience
reactions to the same speech appear between
square brackets rather than parentheses,
reinforcing the likelihood that this particular
interjection was typeset deliberately.
8. On the negative side of the ledger, this single
";)" was the only such "emoticon" in the
speech, and the rest of the text suffers
from enough typographical errors that we
cannot be certain it was a calculated addition.
Though its form is undeniably familiar, the
precise meaning of this first emoticon
remains unknown.
9. The meandering path toward the modern emoticon continued
in 1887, when the celebrated (and feared) critic Ambrose
Bierce penned a tongue-in-cheek essay on writing reform
entitled "For Brevity and Clarity." Alongside helpful
contractions of phrases such as "much esteemed by all
who knew him" (mestewed), Bierce presented a new mark
of punctuation intended to help less fortunate writers
convey humor or irony, which he called "the snigger point,
or note of cachinnation." (Now almost extinct,
"cachinnation" means "loud or immoderate laughter.") It
looked like a line with the ends turned up and, he wrote,
"represents, as nearly as may be, a smiling mouth." Of
course, his proposal was itself an ironic act, and
unsurprisingly, the mark didn't catch on.
10. The last pre-Internet emoticons ambled casually into view at
the end of the 1960s. First, in 1967, a Baltimore Sunday
Sun columnist named Ralph Reppert was quoted in the May
edition of Reader's Digest. Reppert, writing that his "Aunt
Ev is the only person I know who can write a facial
expression," explained that: "Aunt Ev's expression is a
symbol that looks like this: —) It represents her tongue
stuck in her cheek. Here's the way she used it in her last
letter: 'Your Cousin Vernie is a natural blonde again —)[.]'
" Its appearance was apparently a one-off.
11. Two years later, on a literary plane far removed from the
Reader's Digest, another analog smiley sprung from the
mind of Vladimir Nabokov. A famously controlling
interviewee, Nabokov insisted on being provided with
questions in advance. Once, recounting a reporter's
question as to where Nabokov ranked himself among
writers of his era, the Russian émigré replied obliquely:
"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."
