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Original bulletin board thread in which ‘:-)’ was proposed

cs.cmu.edu

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Re: Original bulletin board thread in which ‘:-)’ was proposed

#91

Post by calt »

jobigoud wrote: post #88
rdiddly wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The smiley is an efficient general-purpose abstraction of reality; the emoji is a million instances of copy-pasted overly-specific code.

Emojis are in Unicode. They aren't parsed or converted to multiple glyphs anymore, the text editor will provide them directly. http://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html I was doubtful of emojis at first, but now I'm loving the concept. They really help me communicate emotions that I wouldn't put into actual words. Smileys can't really do that. Culturally I see it as a the first universal (limited) language…

There have been attempts a universal language that are quite fascinating. There's an interesting RadioLab on the subject of Bissymbols. I suppose the one that sticks and evolves over time is the one that probably matters though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blissymbols http://www.radiolab.org/story/257194-man-became-bliss/

Re: Original bulletin board thread in which ‘:-)’ was proposed

#92

Post by mjburgess »

kelvich wrote: post #65

Nabokov's interview. The New York Times [1969] -- How do you rank yourself among writers (living) and of the immediate past? -- 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.

Which had already been used in the days of the telegraph.

The first use of OMG (oh my god) and other such initialisms was 19th. C.

I would imagine that includes :)

Re: Original bulletin board thread in which ‘:-)’ was proposed

#94

Post by WorldMaker »

halomru wrote: post #76
yitchelle wrote: post #60

Interestingly, before I read this post and the comments, I have always thought that :-) means a smiling face. Ie, to convey a sense of a smile after writing a message. Not a "I am joking" message. Well, I learned something today.

At some point between 1982 and the late nineties ;) replaced :-) as the joke indicator. But with modern WhatsApp rendering ;) as a suggestive grin instead of a simple wink I imagine the current generation of teenagers has found a new innocent joke marker.

At least anecdotally, I've always seen/used :P much more that ;) for funny. ;) has always been more flirty/suggestive, but that may be having spent more of the 90s in MUDs/MUSHes with a greater sense of roleplay.

Definitely in modern emoji sets the tongue out emojis seem to be better indicators of an intended sense of humor more than flirty/suggestive ones (plus the combo ;P for intending flirty and funny).

Re: Original bulletin board thread in which ‘:-)’ was proposed

#95

Post by Steuard »

artbikes wrote: post #74

Like most of the cultural inventions of virtual communities there was prior art on PLATO. http://www.platohistory.org/blog/2012/09/plato-emoticons-rev...

Those emoticons seem to have been in many ways better than :-) and its relatives, but it sounds like they 1) relied on details of the platform, and (related) 2) never caught on more broadly. So I think it's still reasonable to celebrate the invention of :-) (while maybe imagining how much richer text conversations might have been if the PLATO text-display system had become ubiquitous).

Re: Original bulletin board thread in which ‘:-)’ was proposed

#96

Post by felixgallo »

Steuard wrote: post #95
artbikes wrote: post #74

Like most of the cultural inventions of virtual communities there was prior art on PLATO. http://www.platohistory.org/blog/2012/09/plato-emoticons-rev...

Those emoticons seem to have been in many ways better than :-) and its relatives, but it sounds like they 1) relied on details of the platform, and (related) 2) never caught on more broadly. So I think it's still reasonable to celebrate the invention of :-) (while maybe imagining how much richer text conversations might have been if the PLATO text-display system had become ubiquitous).

I was definitely using :-) on Plato in 1979. I'd be surprised if Plato was the first use, though.

Re: Original bulletin board thread in which ‘:-)’ was proposed

#98

Post by benbreen »

Apropos is this debate about whether an intentional :) shows up in a 1648 poem:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2014/04/15/emotico...

Here's the verse:

Tumble me down, and I will sit

Upon my ruines (smiling yet :)

I think that the article does a fairly convincing job of showing that this is just weird 17th century typography, but then again, there was enough experimentation with printing at the time that it also wouldn't surprise me if it was intentional, at least at some point in the typesetting process.

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