Happy 25th Birthday to :-)

Twenty-five years ago, Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman made a serious contribution to the electronic lexicon. He was the first to use three keystrokes - a colon followed by a hyphen and a parenthesis - as a horizontal "smiley face" in a computer message. Fahlman posted the emoticon in a message to an online electronic bulletin board at 11:44 a.m. on Sept. 19, 1982, during a discussion about the limits of online humor and how to denote comments meant to be taken lightly. “I propose the following character sequence for joke markers: :-)” wrote Fahlman. “Read it sideways.”

The prehistory of emoticons goes back to 1857 when the National Telegraphic Review and Operators Guide documented the use of the number 73 in Morse code to express "love and kisses." In 1887 Ambrose Bierce proposed adding a punctuation mark that he called a “snigger point” to “every jocular or ironical clause of a sentence otherwise serious.” Bierce's call for sarcastic punctuation was itself couched in sarcasm, as evidenced in this passage from The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. XI: Antepenultimata (1912), courtesy of Google Books:


Emoticons, text-speak, and general “net lingo” have been the subject of much research, generally falling under the umbrella of computer-mediated communication (CMC) or computer-mediated discourse (CMD). Language is of such great interest perhaps because most Internet interaction is achieved through text. The Internet has often been hailed as a new and different space for language use: written, yet free from the formality of much conventional written media, and divorced from many of the social constraints of face-to-face conversation.