Happy Birthday, :-) !
Emoticons and Emojis
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Emoticons (or smileys, as they used to be known in their early days) were born on September 19, 1982 — 39 years ago. On that day, Scott Fahlman, currently Professor Emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University, wrote:
I propose that 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:-(
As a matter of fact, Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov predicted the arrival of emoticons in 1969 in an interview with the NYT:
“I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile — some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket.”
The first emoticons consisted of a colon (eyes), a dash (nose — still used in Eastern Europe but virtually disappeared in the USA), and a parenthesis (mouth). Square brackets, braces, semicolons, capital “D,” digits 3 and 8, and other ASCII characters, as…
