JBeukema
Rookie
- Banned
- #1
I used to be anti-emoticon. For years, I thought of smiley faces as the mark of an immature writerthe kind who punctuates a sentence with seven exclamation points. Then one day, after years of reading them, I was composing a sentence I wanted to make very sure the reader knew was a jokeand so I did it. Slowly, those little guys crept into my emails. I started becoming enamored of the more clever ones, and still cannot help but smile when I see the sad monkey face:@
A punctuation purist would claim that emoticons are debased ways to signal tone and voice, something a good writer should be able to indicate with words. But the contrary is true: The history of punctuation is precisely the history of using symbols to denote tone and voice. Seen in this way, emoticons are simply the latest comma or quotation mark. And despite the oft-repeated story that Carnegie Mellon professor Scott Fahlman invented the smiley and the frown face all the way back in 1982, the history of emoticons goes back much further.
In 1887, Ambrose Bierce wrote an essay, "For Brevity and Clarity," suggesting ways to alter punctuation to better represent tone. He proposed a single bracket flipped horizontally for wry smiles, "to be appended, with the full stop, to every jocular or ironical sentence."
The Very Long History of Emoticons - Signatures - GOOD
