/ee-moh' ti-kon/ An
ASCII glyph used to indicate an emotional state in
electronic mail or
news. Although originally intended mostly as jokes, emoticons (or some other explicit humour indication)
are virtually required under certain circumstances in high-volume text-only communication forums such as
Usenet the lack of verbal and visual cues can otherwise cause what were intended to be humorous, s
arcastic, ironic, or otherwise non-100%-serious comments to be badly misinterpreted (not always even by
newbies), resulting in
arguments and
flame wars. Hundreds of emoticons have been proposed, but only a few
are in common use. These include: :-) "smiley face" (for humour, laughter, friendliness, occasionally s
arcasm) :-( "frowney face" (for sadness, anger, or upset) -) "half-smiley" (ha ha only serious) also known as "semi-smiley" or "winkey face". :-/ "wry face" These may become more comprehensible if you tilt your head sideways, to the left. The first two
are by f
ar the most frequently encountered. Hyphenless forms of them
are common on
CompuServe,
GEnie, and
BIX see also
bixie. On
Usenet, "smiley" is often used as a generic term synonymous with emoticon, as well as specifically for the happy-face emoticon. It appe
ars that the emoticon was invented by one Scott Fahlman on the
CMU bboard systems
around 1980. He later wrote: "I wish I had saved the original post, or at least recorded the date for posterity, but I had no idea that I was st
arting something that would soon pollute all the world' s communication channels." [
GLS confirms that he remembers this original posting]. As with exclamation m
arks, overuse of the smiley is a m
ark of loserhood! More than one per p
aragraph is a fairly sure sign that you' ve gone over the line. [
Jargon File] (1994-12-02)
In addition suitable contents:
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