
 A Story of the Type That Turns heads In Computer Circles

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   Digital Smiley Faces Are used In E-mail Conversations
                   By the Lateral Minded

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                      WSJ Tue 9-15-92
                                                                       
                   By MICHAEL W. MILLER
         Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

  The subject is uncontrollable scalp flaking. On a computer bulletin
board called the Well, "Casey," as she calls herself on-line, is
proposing a novel remedy. "I found that rinsing my scalp with vinegar
will cut down on it for a while," her electronic message advises. "If
you don't mind smelling like a salad :-)"

   Elsewhere on the Well, a debate rages over the rules of etiquette for
newlyweds. Scott Marley of Albany, Calif. joins in: "I believe Miss
Manners insists that the thank-you notes must be sent before the
divorce :-)" 

  All over the country these days, electronic mail messages are
concluding.with this odd little punctuation sequence :-) or one of its
many variants, like :-(

   These are "smileys," so-called be- cause when you tilt your head to
the left, they look like little faces with a colon for  eyes and a
hyphen for a nose. Thus, when a  message ends :-) it means "just
kidding."  If it ends :-( it means "I'm depressed." If it  ends 7:^] it
means "I resemble Ronald  Reagan." 

     They Love Symbols 

  You may have thought that the only people who use smiley faces in
written communication are motivational consultants and teenagers in
love. But the electronic smiley is spreading like a virus in the new
medium of e-mail, used by thousands as a form of emotional punctuation. 
 One smiley dictionary circulating on computer bulletin boards lists 664
distinct variations, including: 

:-D       I'm laughing.

B-)       I'm cool. 

:*)       I'm drunk.

:-'I      I have a cold.

((:-)     I have a toupee. 
)(:-(     I have a toupee and it's windy.  

 Smileys started popping up on computer screens more than a decade ago.
The MIT Press's "New Hacker's Dictionary" attributes the very first
smiley to a 1980 message by a Carnegie Mellon computer scientist named
Scott Fahlman. "I wish I had saved the original post or at least
recorded the date for posterity," he later wrote, "but I had no idea
that I was starting something that would soon pollute all the world's
communication channels.

     "Having a Nice Day?"

   Today it's hard to log on to a bulletin board without tripping over
someone's electronic face..On some boards, it's de rigueur to use a
noseless version known as "midget smiley," which looks like the
original, ubiquitous 1970s happy face :) The CompuServe network, where
1.1 million computer buffs swap messages, has its own smiley
alternative, representing the word "grin." A recent usage: "Women
irrational? Nahhhhhhh! Can't be <g>" 

   "Dvorak's Guide to PC Telecommunications," a popular technical tome,
devotes four pages to the symbols. It soberly explains: "These are
called emoticons and are used to express online the emotions of normal
voice communication." The guide lists 105 essential examples, including
     :-8       (I'm talking out of both sides of my mouth) and
      =1:-)=   (I'm Uncle Sam).

   Why is this happening now, when for thousands of years writers have
found it possible to express emotions without using little sideways
smiley faces? The smiley's roots may well go back to the science 
fiction "fanzines" of the '40s and '50s, homemade cult publications such
as "Spaceship"  and "Rhodomagnetic Digest." The writer Harlan Ellison,
a pioneering fanzine publisher, recalls that contributors commonly
punctuated their in- side jokes with a simple sideways smile in
quotation marks, like so: ")"

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