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rfmcdonaldWired produced an article today commemorating the 29th anniversary of the creation of the modern emoticon, :-) and then :-( being the two foundation characters of this symbolic system.
At precisely 11:44 a.m., Scott Fahlman posts the following electronic message to a computer-science department bulletin board at Carnegie Mellon University:19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman :-)
From: Scott E Fahlman
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
:-(With that post, Fahlman became the acknowledged originator of the ASCII-based emoticon. From those two simple emoticons (a portmanteau combining the words emotion and icon) have sprung dozens of others that are the joy, or bane, of e-mail, text-message and instant-message correspondence the world over.
Fahlman was not, however, the first person to use typographical symbols to convey emotions. The practice goes back at least to the mid-19th century, when Morse code symbols were occasionally used for the same purpose. Other examples exist as well.In 1881, the American satirical magazine Puck published what we would now call emoticons, using hand-set type. No less a wordsmith than Ambrose Bierce suggested using what he called a “snigger point” — \__/ — to convey jocularity or irony. Baltimore’s Sunday Sun suggested a tongue-in-cheek sideways character in 1967.
But none of those caught on. The internet emoticon truly traces its lineage directly to Fahlman, who says he came up with the idea after reading “lengthy diatribes” from people on the message board who failed to get the joke or the sarcasm in a particular post — which is probably what “given current trends” refers to in his own, now-famous missive.
Fahlman has the entire reconstructed discussion thread archived at his website, here.
What appeals to me most about emoticons is that they're arguably the only new punctuation marks to have recently made it into the languages of the world.
Before Fahlman's particular (and very successful) innovation, there had been proposals for non-standard punctuation marks, marks that would have served a purpose. Take the interrobang, ‽, a character that--Wikipedia notes--would "combine the functions of the question mark (also called the “interrogative point”) and the exclamation mark or exclamation point (known in printers’ jargon as the “bang”). [. . .] A sentence ending with an interrobang asks a question in an excited manner, expresses excitement or disbelief in the form of a question, or asks a rhetorical question. For example: Are you nuts‽" The interrobang could fill a particular niche in written language, but for whatever reason--that niche's relative triviality versus the adoption costs of a new puncutation mark, say--the interrobang didn't take off. Neither did its various other peers.
Emoticons, notably, did take off. Emoticons are punctuation marks, broadening the bandwidth of written language just enough to give the reader an insight into the emotional state of the writer. That's a hugely important niche, especially in contexts where emotional context means all. ":-)" might not be suitable for casual use in more formal written document styles like that of the scholarly essay, sure--"The costs of separating from the Eurozone would be exceptionally high :-(", for instance--and I certainly don't use them in my own blog posts, but emotional context is very rarely relevant to the interpretation of those sorts of written documents regardless. In the context of casual communication, emoticons rule.
The emoticon, as a class of punctuation marks, because of the class' decidedly strong merits. Fahlman was one of many people aware of the concept, yes, but his particular proposals for filling that niche in written language were the hugely successful ones. I'd say that he deserves his fame. :-)
