Celebrating Smiley Today
September 19, 2008 |
If you are not sure about what you could celebrate when drinking a beer tonight (it’s Friday, after all), there’s quite a nice occasion for you today – birthday of our beloved smiley face. 26 years ago, on September 19th, 1982, Scott Fahlman, computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, suggested using 3 symbols – colon, hyphen and a closing bracket – to mark a smiling face in a typed text to demonstrate a joke or a humorous tone of a sentence. I believe we can absolutely count it as a historical day as a smiley face has undoubtedly brought a lot into the lexicon we use online.
It was no occasional idea for the professor: the billboard of the university contained quite a lengthy discussion of what symbols could be used to hint at a humorous nature of a message in a chat or email. The original “smiley” message was only found in 2000 when a group of enthusiasts started something of a historical research of digital era to find the first use of a smiley.
I am quite proud that the idea of emoticons has some Russian origins as well since Scott Fahlman was not the first to suggest it (even though he coined the actual look of a smiley). Back in April 1969 Russian-American writer Vladimir Nabokov (best-known for his Lolita novel) suggested a very similar idea in an interview to Alden Whitman of the New York Times saying “I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile — some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket”.
And even if we have tons of different variations of emoticons with different countries having their own habits, I think the birthday of the original smiley form well deserves a small celebration today. So here are a few creative smiley photos for your viewing pleasure and to tune you to a smiling Friday mood:
