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EXCERPTED FROM THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
SEPTEMBER 15, 1992. P.1
A Story of the Type that Turns Heads in Computer Circles
By Michael Miller
All over the country these days, electronic mail messages are
concluding with this odd little punctuation sequence: :-) or one of
its many variants, like :-(
These are "smileys," so-called because when you tilt your head to the
left they look like little faces with a colon for eyes and a hyphen
for a nose. Thus when a message ends :-) it means "just kidding." If
it ends :-( it means "I'm depressed." If it ends 7:^] it means "I
resemble Ronald Reagan."
One smiley dictionary circulating on computer bulletin boards lists
664 different distinct variations, including:
:-D I'm laughing
B-) I'm cool
:*) I'm drunk
:-'| I have a cold
{(:-) I have a toupee
}(:-( I have a toupee and it's windy
Smileys started popping up on computer screens more than a decade ago.
The MIT Press's "New Hacker's Dictionary" attributes the very first
smiley to a 1980 message by a Carnegie Mellon computer scientist named
Scott Fahlman. "I wish I had saved the original post or at least
recorded the date for posterity," he later wrote, "but I had no idea I
was starting something that would soon pollute all the world's
communications channels."
On some boards, its de rigueur to use a noseless version known as
"midget smiley," which looks like the original, ubiquitous 1970s
happy face :)
"Dvorak's Guide to PC Telecommunications," a popular technical tome,
devotes four pages to the symbols. It soberly explains: "These are
called emoticons and are used to express online the emotions of normal
voice communications." The guide lists 105 essential examples,
including :-8 (I'm talking out of both sides of my mouth) and =|:-)=
(Uncle Sam).
Why is this happening now, when for thousands of years writers have
found it possible to express emotions without using little sideways
smiley faces? The smiley's roots may well go back to the science
fiction "fanzines" of the '40s and 50s, homemade cult publications
such as "Spaceship" and "Rhodomagnetic Digest." The writer Harlan
Ellison, a pioneer fanzine publisher, recalls that the contributors
commonly punctuated their inside jokes with a simple sideways smile in
quotation marks, like so: ")"
Today smiley scholars (there are already a handful) attribute the
trend to the hybrid quality of e-mail, which at times is less like an
exchange of letters than like a telephone conversation. Without some
device to suggest a tone of voice, they say, e-mail is uniquely ripe
for misunderstanding.
Sometimes the smiley also helps in the difficult business of flirting
via computer. Consider this exchange on the Well [a computer bulletin
board]:
She: In general I hate the smell of perfumes and deodorants, while the
smell of certain people's fresh sweat turns me into a gooey gibbering
mass of slithery lust."
He: "Hmmmmmm...i work out tuesday and thursday... :-) "
In he same context, a popular alternative is the "winky" ;-)
There are computer users whose faces wrinkle with distaste at the
whole smiley phenomenon.
"I cringe when I see them," says the movie critic Roger Ebert, a
hatitue of CompuServe, interviewed via e-mail. On the other hand, he
adds, "smileys might be a real help for today's students, raised on TV
and unskilled at spotting irony without a laugh track."
An even fiercer anti-smiley is the comedian/magician Penn Jillette,
who runs a computer bulletin board with his partner Teller and writes
the "Micro Mephisto" column in PC Computing magazine. His scornful
verdict: "As soon as you put one in you've killed the joke." In a
recent column, he described the smiley as "the hateful :) which means
'just kidding' and is used by people who would dot their i's with
little circles and should have their eyes dotted with Drano."
SIDEBAR
The Noah Webster of smileys is David Sanderson of Madison, Wis, a
programmer and occasional computer science graduate student. "Add
:-)-0 to your collection (smiling doctor with a stethoscope)." His
files currently contain 664 examples (including several too
anatomically vivid to reprint in this newspaper). Following are some
highlights:
:'( I'm crying
:-# My lips are sealed
:-& I'm tongue-tied
%-) I'm cross-eyed
':-) I accidentally shaved off one eyebrow
(-) I need a haircut
(:)-) I'm scuba diving
*>|:-) I'm Santa Claus
+-(:-) I'm the Pope
:-))) I'm overweight
=:-) I'm a punk rocker
:-J I'm being tongue-in-cheek
5:-) I'm Elvis
L:-) I just graduated
[:-) I'm wearing a Walkman
d:-) I'm a baseball player
0-) I'm a Cyclops
:8) I'm a pig
3:-o I'm a cow
:=8) I'm a baboon
(,'%/ I slept too long on one side
:-)>- I just washed my goatee
:-Q I'm smoking
:-? I'm smoking a pipe
:-' I'm chewing tobacco
:-E I have dental problems
:-o I'm bored (yawn)
:-{} I have heavy lipstick
C|:-= I'm Charlie Chaplin
|:[' I'm Groucho Marx
<<<<(:-) I'm a hat salesman
:%)% I have acne
C=>:*')) I'm a drunk demonic chef with a cold and a double chin
ú parsons ragmop 10/06/92
§Information Design @friends 10/06/92 Wall Street Journal article on