Smileys turned 134 years old

    Most people who use emoticons believe that this form of manifestation of their emotions in text messages appeared relatively recently - approximately when computer technologies and messages began to spread around the world. But it is not so. On March 30, 1881, the Puck humorous magazine published a short note about the ability to express emotions using printed characters. There is still an opinion that this publication was not the first, and emoticons were used back in 1648.

    At the same time, it is believed that emoticons became popular after Scott Falman, a specialist from Carnegie Mellon University, suggested using the combination: :-) for humorous / sarcastic posts so that the reader can immediately understand that this is a joke. Falman suggested the smiley on September 19, 1982. But typographic symbols were used to express emotions long before Falman.

    By the way, now all this has become much more diverse. So, there were new emoticons like "<3". There is even a variation using Japanese characters, which allows you to create real pictures, rather than simple emoticons. For example, ¯ \ _ (ツ) _ / ¯ and (╯ ° □ °) ╯︵ ┻━┻. Well, you should not forget about ASCII art .


    Image taken from WikiMedia Commons

    In addition, emoticons may have been used even earlier. For example, on the Web there is an image, a scan of an old newspaper column, with a reprint of President Lincoln's speech:

    Image taken from nytimes

    True, it is not entirely clear here whether this is a typo or the actual use of an emoticon.

    There is another example from 1648, and a serious discussion has unfolded about this “emoticon”. The participants in the discussion tried to understand whether this is a smiley face, a typo, or the peculiarities of the use of punctuation by the author, poet Robert Gerrick. Image taken from vice.com Be that as it may, emoticons really appeared before 1982, and in a year they will be 135 years old. In the meantime, congratulations on the “round” date of 134 years. Emoticons are such emoticons ¯ \ _ (ツ) _ / ¯







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