Smiley :-)

How to read it

Fahlman’s post of 19 September 1982 proposed :-) “for joke makers” and told readers to “Read it sideways.” The mark has since widened from a joke marker to a sign of happiness: Encyclopaedia Britannica lists :) as conveying happiness, with :-) and :] as variations, and swapping the bracket for a capital D, as in :D, makes the smile an open-mouthed grin or laugh. The short form without a nose, :), is now far the commoner. Jaram Park and colleagues found it the most popular emoticon on Twitter, in 46 million tweets, and in Tyler Schnoebelen’s sample of American English tweets from 2011 it was in 39.6% of the tweets carrying one of the 28 commonest emoticons, against 4.9% for :-).

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Why Fahlman proposed it

Carnegie Mellon’s computer scientists talked on online bulletin boards in the early 1980s. Fahlman writes that when someone made a sarcastic remark, a few readers would miss the joke and each post a lengthy reply, and in at least one case a humorous remark was taken as a serious safety warning. Joke markers were being suggested, and Fahlman proposed :-) because it could be typed on the ASCII terminals of the day. His post was lost for years and recovered from the department’s backup tapes, which fixed its date as 19 September 1982. He has been told that teletype operators used :-) or :) before him, though he has seen no examples, and says his suggestion was the one that took hold. Britannica quotes him on why he didn’t trademark it: “It had to be free.”

With a nose or without

:-) and :) are the same smile, but Schnoebelen found they are used by different people. Of 21,123 Twitter users with ten or more :)’s, 17,731 used no :-) at all. From the words that came with each, he concluded that “non-nose users are younger than nose users”: they used emoticons more, wrote more non-standard spellings and more taboo words, and mentioned younger celebrities. The nose came first, he notes, so leaving it out was a move away from the older standard.

The typed face and the picture

Unicode has the same face as a single character: U+263A WHITE SMILING FACE ☺, annotated “have a nice day!”, and the emoji U+1F642 SLIGHTLY SMILING FACE 🙂. Some programs turn a typed :-) into a picture, and Schnoebelen notes that some phones needed the nose before they would do it. Fahlman wrote that turning the characters into little pictures destroys the whimsical element of the original.

Look-alikes

The wink ;-) differs only in its eyes, a semicolon for a colon; the frowny :-( turns the bracket round. Upright faces such as ^^ smile with the eyes instead of the mouth; Park found :) much more common in the US and Europe than in Asian countries.