There is Now an Emoticon for What I am Feeling
My friend Kyle yesterday discovered something related to our alma mater that neither of us knew: The first smiley, :-) , was used on a Carnegie Mellon electronic bulletin board in October 1982. So tally up another point of CMU pride next to the self-driving Humvee, the robot soccer team, and Ted Danson.
I like the mildly verbose style of the proposal (very typical for humorous techie remarks), which seems half a world away from its (and its ilk's) eventual dominance as a lazy emotional shorthand. I'd be interested in whether these apparently quarter-century-old emoticons are still commonly used by the current crop of borderline subliterate teens, or whether they've moved on to character sets easier to enter on a cell phone keypad and text to their friends while crashing their mothers' SUVs.
I like the mildly verbose style of the proposal (very typical for humorous techie remarks), which seems half a world away from its (and its ilk's) eventual dominance as a lazy emotional shorthand. I'd be interested in whether these apparently quarter-century-old emoticons are still commonly used by the current crop of borderline subliterate teens, or whether they've moved on to character sets easier to enter on a cell phone keypad and text to their friends while crashing their mothers' SUVs.
2 Comments:
Bob Cosgrove, mentioned in the CMU article, is Katie's dad.
:-) (my first ever)
I've always felt slightly put off by the whole emoticon thing too. :-|
I like the Nabokov quote that the smiley inventor includes in his recollection:
Q: How do you rank yourself among writers (living) and of the immediate past?
Nabokov: 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.
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