30 lines
1.9 KiB
Plaintext
30 lines
1.9 KiB
Plaintext
emoticon
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/eemohtikon/ , n. [common] An ASCII glyph used to indicate an emotional
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state in email or news. Although originally intended mostly as jokes,
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emoticons (or some other explicit humor indication) are virtually required
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under certain circumstances in high-volume text-only communication forums
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such as Usenet; the lack of verbal and visual cues can otherwise cause what
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were intended to be humorous, sarcastic, ironic, or otherwise
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non-100%-serious comments to be badly misinterpreted (not always even by
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newbie s), resulting in arguments and flame war s. Hundreds of emoticons
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have been proposed, but only a few are in common use. These include: :-)
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smiley face (for humor, laughter, friendliness, occasionally sarcasm) :-(
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frowney face (for sadness, anger, or upset) ;-) half-smiley ( ha ha only
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serious ); also known as semi-smiley or winkey face. :-/ wry face (These may
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become more comprehensible if you tilt your head sideways, to the left.) The
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first two listed are by far the most frequently encountered. Hyphenless
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forms of them are common on CompuServe, GEnie, and BIX; see also bixie. On
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Usenet , smiley is often used as a generic term synonymous with emoticon ,
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as well as specifically for the happy-face emoticon. The invention of the
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original smiley and frowney emoticons is generally credited to Scott Fahlman
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at CMU in 1982. He later wrote: I wish I had saved the original post, or at
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least recorded the date for posterity, but I had no idea that I was starting
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something that would soon pollute all the world's communication channels. In
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September 2002 the original post was recovered. There is a rival claim by
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one Kevin McKenzie, who seems to have proposed the smiley on the MsgGroup
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mailing list, April 12 1979. It seems likely these two inventions were
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independent. Users of the PLATO educational system report using emoticons
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composed from overlaid dot-matrix graphics in the 1970s.
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