New Emoticons....

[Phube]

I like!!!

[Ultra]

[Phube]

Oooh I missed

[Alexikokopops]

I like the camp one, he can only be tittering.

I can only aspire to be as happy as that one swinging his arms about.

[David O'Leary]

Well Done whoever invented them

[OriginalRobboFOX]

Well Done whoever invented them

History

The National Telegraphic Review and Operators Guide in April 1857 documented the use of the number 73 in Morse code to express "love and kisses" (later reduced to the more formal "best regards"). Dodge's Manual in 1908 documented the reintroduction of "love and kisses" as the number 88. Gajadhar and Green comment that both Morse code abbreviations are more succinct than modern abbreviations such as .[1][2]

In 1912 Ambrose Bierce proposed "an improvement in punctuation — the snigger point, or note of cachinnation: it is written thus \___/! and presents, as near as may be, a smiling mouth. It is to be appended, with the full stop, [or exclamation mark as Bierce's later example used] to every jocular or ironical sentence".[3]

Emoticons had already come into use in sci-fi fandom in the 1940s,[4] although there seems to have been a lapse in cultural continuity between the communities.

An early instance of using text characters to represent a sideways smiling (and frowning) face occurred in an ad for the MGM movie Lili in the New York Herald Tribune, March 10, 1953, page 20, cols. 4-6. (See "Creation of :-) and :-(" section below.)

In 1963, the "smiley face", a yellow button with two black dots representing eyes and an upturned thick curve representing mouth, was created by freelance artist Harvey Ball. It was realized on order of a large insurance company as part of a campaign to bolster the morale of its employees and soon became a big hit. This smiley presumably inspired many later emoticons; the most basic graphic emoticon depicts this is in fact a small, yellow, smiley face.

In a New York Times interview in April 1969, Alden Whitman asked writer Vladimir Nabokov: "How do you rank yourself among writers (living) and of the immediate past?" Nabokov answered: "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." [5]

[edit] Proto-emoticons

Several Internet websites —such as BT's Connected Earth[6]— assert that Kevin Mackenzie proposed -) as a joke-marker in April 1979, on a message board called MsgGroup. The idea was to indicate tongue-in-cheek — the hyphen represented a tongue, not a nose. Although it has two out of the three characters of ":-)", its intended interpretation was different and it does not appear to have inspired the later smileys.

[edit] Creation of and

The creator of the original ASCII emoticons and , with a specific suggestion that they be used to express emotion, was Scott Fahlman;[7] the text of his original proposal, posted to the Carnegie Mellon University computer science general board on 19 September 1982 (11:44), was considered lost for a long time. It was however recovered twenty years later by Jeff Baird, from old backup tapes.[8]

19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman

From: Scott E Fahlman <Fahlman at Cmu-20c>

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

[edit] Graphical replacement

In Web forums and instant messengers, text emoticons are often automatically replaced with small corresponding images, which came to be called emoticons as well. Similarly, in some versions of Microsoft Word, the Auto Correct feature replaces basic smileys such as :-) and :-( with a single smiley-like character. Originally, these image emoticons were fairly simple and replaced only the most straightforward and common character sequences, but over time they became so complex that the more specialized emoticons are often input using a menu or popup windows, sometimes listing hundreds of items. Some of these graphical emoticons do not actually represent faces or emotions; for example, an "emoticon" showing a guitar might be used to represent music. Further, some instant messaging software is designed to play a sound upon receiving certain emoticons.

An August 2004 issue of the Risks Digest (comp.risks on USENET) pointed out a problem with such features which are not under the sender's control:

It's hard to know in advance what character-strings will be parsed into what kind of unintended image. A colleague was discussing his 401(k) plan with his boss, who happens to be female, via instant messaging. He discovered, to his horror, that the boss's instant-messaging client was rendering the "(k)" as a big pair of red smoochy lips.[9]

Emoticons are also commonly used in online computer games.

The most common type of emoticon is the “smiley “ which is simply a cartoon looking face showing a smile, this has evolved into a variety of different facial expressions including frowns, angry grimaces, blushing, crying , looks of surprise and thousands more. Emoticons have expanded beyond simple cartoon facial expressions to a variety of still or moving images, including words character actions and images.[10]

[edit] Western style

Traditionally, the emoticon in Western style is written from left to right, the way one reads and writes in most Western cultures. Thus, most commonly, you'll see the eyes on the left, followed by the nose and mouth. To more easily recognize them, tilt your head toward your left shoulder (or occasionally toward your right shoulder if the "top" of the emoticon is toward the right).

[stez]

<words>

that was actually very interesting

[Raj]

Fan dabby dossi

[DB11]

I like this one:

[davieG]

I like this one:

I think you could be seeing that one a lot

[DB11]

I think you could be seeing that one a lot

I like too. But I HATE

[Stinkenzo]

The has changed hasn't it?

When will the Christmas ones be back?

[lookwhaticando]

The has changed hasn't it?

When will the Christmas ones be back?

Yes it has.

When it's Christmas.

[David O'Leary]

The has changed hasn't it?

When will the Christmas ones be back?

Yes it has.

When it's Christmas.

:laugh: