-- How do you rank yourself among writers
(living) and of the immediate past?
-- I often think there should exist a special typographical
sign for a smile -- some sort of concave mark,
a supine round bracket, which I would now like to
trace in reply to your question.
Even beyond explicit codebooks, telegraph operators extensively used standardized abbreviations, meaning what they actually sent/received was remarkably similar to SMS text-speak, for obvious reasons! "Wr r ty gg r 9" => "Where are they going for No. 9?": http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2015/05/11/history_of_t...
It makes me a bit of a luddite (and a heck of a curmudgeon), but it always makes me a little sad when good ol' ASCII smileys are rendered all fancy-like. There's something charming and hackerish about showing it as a 7-bit glyph.
I think the Internet fundamentally changed when that happened.
Tangentially-related, I can't fathom why someone would post YouTube videos of `telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl`.
My biggest problem with this is when the images auto-replacing your text emotes convey a completely different expression, and you have no control over it.
Skype is the worst offender, where for example the ":3" cat-face gets replaced by an image of a whole cat, without a face at all. If you disable this "feature" in your options, it's only disabled on YOUR end. The receiving client will still convert your text into images, so now you have NO clue at all how the receiving party interprets your expressions.
Telegram does this RIGHT, where the conversion is done BEFORE your message is sent. If you disable it on your end, the receiver will only receive the text you intended.
I think it's a cultural thing - or more precisely, a non-culture-specific thing, which should be as unoffensive as possible.
Honestly, I don't envy those that design and publish emojis, it's a cultural minefield. :-) has no color, gender, outfit or what-have-you. There's been a lot of debate about the skin tone of e.g. the thumbs up emoji (which now comes in half a dozen colors if the relatively ambiguous / non-human yellow isn't to your needs), the gender of emojis depicting jobs, and the color of outfits of emojis depicting jobs.
I was doubtful of emojis at first, but now I'm loving the concept. They really help me communicate emotions that I wouldn't put into actual words. Smileys can't really do that.
Culturally I see it as a the first universal (limited) language, using standardized ideograms. Maybe in a few decades we can express full sentences and we will have a written language for all Humans to use. 21st century hieroglyphs.
As a college student, I use emoji constantly to communicate all sorts of abstract sentiments, but in my experience they can also be irritatingly ambiguous and highly dependent on cultural norms and interpretation.
Take the thumbs up emoji - within my social circles, the exact same emoji can be interpreted both as a enthusiastic agreement ("Sure!") and also as a sarcastic affirmation ("Good for you.").
It's often difficult to infer the intended meaning, even with context, and in some circumstances I've found emojis have actually added significantly to the ambiguity and cognitive burden in parsing a text. That's not a problem I have often faced with simple smileys.
There have been attempts a universal language that are quite fascinating. There's an interesting RadioLab on the subject of Bissymbols. I suppose the one that sticks and evolves over time is the one that probably matters though.
That automatic emoji concept can be quite annoying sometimes.
For instance, Outlook 365 will automatically turn "B)" into the "smiling face with sunglasses" emoji. I cannot fathom this use case. Apparently someone at Microsoft thought that things like, oh, a fairly common styling of a simple lettered list (A) Do this B) Do that C) Etc.) and parenthesized words / sentences ending in capital B (abbreviations will get you there, like say BBB) are not very common in corporate communication. The need for a smiling face sunglasses clad emoji was much stronger. Go figure.
Which looks like a bald person without a mouth to me :-)
Somehow I've become accustomed to 'read' emoji as tilting your head to the left. Turning the emoji around always reminds me of German books, which often have the title upside down on the book spine compared to English / Dutch books.
I think that the article does a fairly convincing job of showing that this is just weird 17th century typography, but then again, there was enough experimentation with printing at the time that it also wouldn't surprise me if it was intentional, at least at some point in the typesetting process.
Those emoticons seem to have been in many ways better than :-) and its relatives, but it sounds like they 1) relied on details of the platform, and (related) 2) never caught on more broadly. So I think it's still reasonable to celebrate the invention of :-) (while maybe imagining how much richer text conversations might have been if the PLATO text-display system had become ubiquitous).
Interesting thing to note is that before Fahlman suggested ":-)" symbol, Leonard Hamey suggested "{#}" (see 17-Sep-82 17:42 post). After that, someone suggested "\__/" (see 20-Sep-82 17:56 post). But only ":-)" gained popularity.
Not only # \__/ and :-) were suggested but also '&', which the explanation on why is (to say at least) imaginative:
17-Sep-82 17:40 Keith Wright at CMU-10A *%&#$ Jokes!
No, no, no! Surely everyone will agree that "&" is the funniest character on the keyboard. It looks funny (like a jolly fat man in convulsions of laughter). It sounds funny (say it loud and fast three times). I just know if I could get my nose into the vacuum of the CRT it would even smell funny!
There is a whole parallel smiley history from Asia that either hasn't been documented as well as the western smileys or simply hasn't been translated.
The notable thing about asian smileys is that they have the same horizon as the text, whereas western smileys needs to be turned 90 degrees. Compare (^.^) with :-)
So given that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ is both unicode and horizontal indicates that it is either from Asia or came to be after asian smileys became more prevalent in the west.
Interesting that Japanese smileys show emotion via the eyes while the American-born ones show emotion via the mouth, which mirrors the respective cultural norms.
Probably Japan. ツ is a very common Japanese charterer pronounced "tsu".
As wodenokoto said there is a whole separate history of Asian smileys that are right way up, with the face in the middle and various decorations on both sides. They did have the advantage of a larger set of characters from the start.
Past the point where we thought that ideas should be or even can be segmented into those interesting to women vs those interesting to men, which is a rather silly idea rooted in gender unfounded stereotypes and possibly a bit of sexism.
This one in particular I never quite grasped. I mean, there've been a couple times, when I stopped short and came off the seat and pedals, that I really wished, in an extremely immediate and visceral fashion, that my bike's top tube wasn't quite where it was.
On the other hand, I suppose the "women's bike" design probably lacks something in rigidity by comparison, so I suppose there's an argument either way.
That's exactly what I've always been told. If you're wearing a skirt/dress, the bar on a guy's bike will push your skirt up and create a scandal :O
So "girls' bikes" have a dip in the bar so there's room for a skirt/dress. Still, I wonder if there's a reason they just didn't make all bikes like this to make it cheaper for the manufacturers.
I'd imagine the straight bar could offer more rigidity or I guess maybe it costs slightly more to make the curved version with a longer bar and the process of making the curve. If that's the case, I guess margin-shaving bike manufacturers only made as many of the curved model cycles as they had to in order to address the demand from skirt/dress-wearing customers.
And toys. The local Target has "girls" and "boys" sections. I'm wondering what my daughter is going to say when she finally notices that half the stuff she likes is filed under "boys."
Funny. I'm just a couple years removed from that thread (I was an undergrad then) and I don't even "get" that emoticon. A person standing on a platform with her arms in the air?
Edit: nevermind. Was explained while I was typing.
It's a woman on a pedestal, like the expression: "women should be placed upon a pedestal." The phrase is usually understood to mean that men should treat women with respect, treating them as if they are more important than themselves.
I also thought pedastal. I guess it has been a long time
since I've seen a woman wear a skirt. But I think your interpretation of why is off. I was looking for something sexist (as per OP) so the pedestal fit that for me. I presumed it was an inside joke amoung guys. But since someone pointed out the skirt I know know I was reading into it incorrectly
I didn't down vote you, and I have no special insight into why others have, but my guess would be that at least some of those votes were meant to indicate disagreement with your interpretation: I think more people see the equal sign as representing legs, rather than a pedestal.
If I were to speculate further, I would suspect that some people are wary of interpretations of ambiguous texts that unnecessarily imply sexist/culturally fraught meanings.
Well first, that's not an expression that anyone uses. If there is one, it's the opposite of that. Also, your interpretation of that is incorrect.
Putting something on a pedestal is bad. It's pretending that it's perfect. If you put a person on a pedestal, you remove their humanity and flaws and aren't treating them like a person.
I love how different the conversations were on the internet then.
Now adays, if a thread came about to propose the ':-)', people would devolve into a debate about the proper use of the parenthesis, and at least one user would claim that '(-:' was a better choice, though it is the darkhorse option for the community.
Interestingly, before I read this post and the comments, I have always thought that :-) means a smiling face. Ie, to convey a sense of a smile after writing a message. Not a "I am joking" message.
At some point between 1982 and the late nineties ;) replaced :-) as the joke indicator. But with modern WhatsApp rendering ;) as a suggestive grin instead of a simple wink I imagine the current generation of teenagers has found a new innocent joke marker.
At least anecdotally, I've always seen/used :P much more that ;) for funny. ;) has always been more flirty/suggestive, but that may be having spent more of the 90s in MUDs/MUSHes with a greater sense of roleplay.
Definitely in modern emoji sets the tongue out emojis seem to be better indicators of an intended sense of humor more than flirty/suggestive ones (plus the combo ;P for intending flirty and funny).
I think it's cool to see this more or less live in action, and in the original context, yes (not sure what the emoji is for that). With many terms/ expressions, it's very unclear where they originated, so if this is indeed the first usage, it is nice to see.
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