MS Technology Vocabulary Emoticon
Janine Louie
January 2009
Computer 7-4
Contents
Definition
A group of keyboard or cursor characters that take on facial expressions or abbreviate phrases and are used to express emotion in text-based electronic communication.
Usage
Emoticons are used when texting, instant messaging, or sending an email. A variety of sites are dedicated to making complex emoticons, like smiley central.(http://smiley.smileycentral.com) Emoticons also include abbreviations of certain phrases. (BTW and G2G) It is used to make it faster to send a point across and to show emotion.
History
Why they were Made
When we still used the telegraph, we had Morse Code abbreviations for phrases like "hugs and kisses" and "best regards". This later turned into modern abbreviations like LOL and JK. These abbreviations and smiley faces shorten the time that it takes to tell the other person what you are feeling and instead of writing the whole sentence which could take some time.
The Name
The happy smiley faces and sad depressed face are called emoticons because they show emotion to the people who you are typing to.
Plato
Teletype machine operators, as early as 1973, used "emoticons" to express themselves. Teletypes were limited to the keys of a standard typewriter keyboard plus a few special characters. Teletype operators developed a sort of shorthand to communicate among themselves. These shorthand notations became the foundation of "emoticons" as computers began to replace teletypes on university campuses. By the early 1970s, people on the PLATO System were using emoticons. They had many of the advantages of later character-based emoticons because they could be used anywhere that you could type text and new emoticons could be created whenever someone thought up a new one. They also had many of the advantages of later graphical emoticons because they used character overstriking which created graphical images.
Creation of :-) and :-(
The first person documented to have used the emoticons :-) and :-(, with a specific suggestion that they be used to express emotion, was Scott Fahlman; the text of his original proposal, posted to the Carnegie Mellon University computer science general board on 19 September 1982 (11:44), was thought to have been lost, but was recovered twenty years later by Jeff Baird from old backup tapes! <pre.raw style="border: 0px;"> 19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman From: Scott E Fahlman <Fahlman at Cmu-20c>
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
- -(
</pre>
Pictures
Examples
Smile - :)
Laugh - :D
Tongue - :P
Wink - ;)
Frown - :(
Surprised - :o
Silence - :I
Awkward - :/
Confused - :S
Angel - 0:)
Devil - }:)
Heart - <3
Elvis - 5:)
Hat - d:)
Robot - [:]
Very Sad - D:
