Smile!

A History of Emoticons
This summer, Facebook rolled out "stickers" on
its website: cartoony takes on the emoticon for
users to post in their chats, from a love-struck
cactus to a pizza-eating cat. Still, for many of
us, the simple sideways smiley face still reigns
in electronic communication.
It started 31 years ago, when a joke about a
fake mercury spill at Carnegie Mellon
University was posted on a digital message
board and mistaken for a genuine safety
warning. The board's users cast about for a
means to distinguish humorous posts from
serious content. On Sept. 19, 1982, faculty
member Scott E. Fahlman entered the debate
with the following message:
I propose that [sic] 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:

:-(
The rest is Internet history. Dr. Fahlman's
expressive, minimal icons became an integral
part of online communication, if not always a
welcome one. These "smileys," as they came to
be known, were effectively the first online
irony marks. But emoticons recur throughout
modern history.
Though it is difficult to nail down the first
appearance in print, one likely contender
appears in an 1862 transcript of a speech by
President Abraham Lincoln. The transcript
records the audience's response to Lincoln's
droll introduction as "(applause and laughter ;)."
Without corroborating evidence, however, it is
impossible to decide whether this is a true
emoticon.
Counting in its favor, the transcript was
typeset by hand, before mechanical typesetting
brought with it the risk of gummed-up
Linotypes accidentally transposing characters.
So it is plausible that ";)"rather than the
more grammatically sensible ");"was
intentional. Moreover, later audience reactions
to the same speech appear between square
brackets rather than parentheses, reinforcing
the likelihood that this particular interjection
was typeset deliberately.
On the negative side of the ledger, this single
";)" was the only such "emoticon" in the speech,
and the rest of the text suffers from enough
typographical errors that we cannot be certain
it was a calculated addition. Though its form is
undeniably familiar, the precise meaning of this
first emoticon remains unknown.
The meandering path toward the modern emoticon continued
in 1887, when the celebrated (and feared) critic Ambrose
Bierce penned a tongue-in-cheek essay on writing reform
entitled "For Brevity and Clarity." Alongside helpful
contractions of phrases such as "much esteemed by all who
knew him" (mestewed), Bierce presented a new mark of
punctuation intended to help less fortunate writers convey
humor or irony, which he called "the snigger point, or note of
cachinnation." (Now almost extinct, "cachinnation" means
"loud or immoderate laughter.") It looked like a line with the
ends turned up and, he wrote, "represents, as nearly as may
be, a smiling mouth." Of course, his proposal was itself an
ironic act, and unsurprisingly, the mark didn't catch on.
The last pre-Internet emoticons ambled casually into view at
the end of the 1960s. First, in 1967, a Baltimore Sunday Sun
columnist named Ralph Reppert was quoted in the May
edition of Reader's Digest. Reppert, writing that his "Aunt
Ev is the only person I know who can write a facial
expression," explained that: "Aunt Ev's expression is a
symbol that looks like this: ) It represents her tongue
stuck in her cheek. Here's the way she used it in her last
letter: 'Your Cousin Vernie is a natural blonde again )[.]' "
Its appearance was apparently a one-off.
Two years later, on a literary plane far removed from the
Reader's Digest, another analog smiley sprung from the
mind of Vladimir Nabokov. A famously controlling
interviewee, Nabokov insisted on being provided with
questions in advance. Once, recounting a reporter's
question as to where Nabokov ranked himself among
writers of his era, the Russian migr replied obliquely: "I
often think there should exist a special typographical sign
for a smilesome sort of concave mark, a supine round
bracket, which I would now like to trace in reply to your
question."
Resources:

http://www.mogicons.com/

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405
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