The Conservative Cave
The Bar => The Lounge => Topic started by: bijou on November 29, 2009, 05:11:51 AM
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Emoticons
Here's something that has to have originated in online culture, right? Nothing symbolizes the "lazily use as few keystrokes as possible" culture of the email/text message generation like combining punctuation to convey human emotions.
For example, this lets people know that there is a spider on your face and you are wearing a party hat.
Actually Been Around Since...
The first emoticon showed up nearly 120 years ago, when author Ambrose Bierce wrote his essay "For Brevity and Clarity" and proposed a new type of punctuation mark to convey jest, which he knew would make the satire a little more clear in typewritten correspondence where he proposed, say, killing a hobo with a bag of doorknobs.
The new punctuation took the form of a horizontal parenthesis, which was meant to look like a smile, sort of like a written laugh track to cue readers in on all the jokes.
Bierce's eyeless horror-smile never caught on, but other versions continued to turn up in places like the personal telegraphs of Abraham Lincoln. Then the most uncanny example of old-timey smileys comes from 1881 when a satirical magazine called Puck--sort of like Ye Olde Cracked.com, presumably with 19th century dick jokes--published its own list of "humorous typographical faces" for use in telegraphs. ...
link (http://www.cracked.com/article/202_8-online-fads-you-didnt-know-were-invented-decades-ago/)
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For an alleged comedy site they have some pretty interesting science and history articles.