while searching for a smiley I found this

[beyelzu]

you ever wonder who first used a smiley well it might have been this guy
scott fahlman

http://research.microsoft.com/~mbj/Smiley/Smiley.html

[viscousmemories]

Cool stuff. I particularly like Scott Fahlman's defense of smilie use (http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/sefSmiley.htm):

Many people have denounced the very idea of the smiley face, pointing out that good writers should have no need to explicitly label their humorous comments. Shakespeare and Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain got along just fine without this. And by labeling the remarks that are not meant to be taken seriously, we spoil the joke. In satirical writing, half the fun is in never being quite sure whether the author is serious or not.

To a large degree, I agree with these critics. Perhaps the E-mail smiley face has done more to degrade our written communication than to improve it. But in defense of the idea, let me say two things:

First, not all people who post on boards have the literary skill of Shakespeare or Twain, and even those luminaries had bad days. If Shakespeare were tossing off a quick note complaining about the lack of employee parking spaces near the Globe Theater, he might have produced the same kind of sloppy prose that the rest of us do. Besides, Shakespeare’s work is full of clichés and his spelling was atrocious. :-)

Second, and more important, these authors were publishing their words in a different medium, with different properties. If 100,000 copies of a novel or an essay were distributed in printed form, and if 1% of the readers didn’t get the joke and were outraged at what they had read, there was nothing these clueless readers could do to spoil the enjoyment of the other 99%. But if it were possible for each of the 1000 clueless readers to write a lengthy counter-argument and to flood these into the same distribution channels as the original work, and if others could then jump into the fray in similar fashion, you can see the problems that this would cause. If the judicious use of a few smilies can reduce the frequency of such firestorms, then maybe it’s not such a bad idea after all. Again, we’re talking here about casual writing on the Internet, not great works printed in one-way media that relatively inaccessible to the general public.

[livius drusus]

And let's not forget the Nabokov provenance.

"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."

-- Vladimir Nabokov, interview, 1969

[beyelzu]

Maybe we should adopt a convention of putting a star (*) in the subject
field of any notice which is to be taken as a joke. from teh website I linked to. I have to say that I really love the idea of a bunch of people taking a joke too seriously on a message board.

It sure it is a good thing that smilies were invented and now people never get upset over a joke or take one too seriously. :D

[JoeP]

It sure it is a good thing that smilies were invented and now people never get upset over a joke or take one too seriously. :D
Bey, don't give me this crap. Have you seen the number of debates even on a relatively civilised board like this where people get upset despite a joke being obvious and marked with a smilie? Smilie use doesn't stop people taking a comment as a serious personal attack. You must be brain-dead if you think the invention of smilies has solved anything. Smilies cause more fucking trouble than they ever saved.

[livius drusus]

Yeah!




:giggle: