What I Learned Today

Emoticons, by their nature, always seemed language-independent to me. Sure, you might debate whether :) or :-) is a better representation, but a smile is a smile, no matter what language the surrounding text might be, right?

Guess not!

Thanks to Ravenous Rob, today I learned that Japanese emailers and webmasters and bloggers have their own Japanese-style emoticons. They are differentiated from the “Western style” emoticons (as Wikipedia’s entry on emoticons calls them) by their orientation. Where we Westerners are used to rotating our heads 90 degrees to the left to puzzle out :) or :P or even >:-O, Japanese people look their emoticons straight on: (^_^) or (0_<) or (~.~). See, you even get cheek lines! The effect is very anime-esque, with the enlarged eyes and round head. While I had actually encountered ;_; before (to indicate "crying in pain because your joke was so bad"), I had not picked up on its Asian overtones. Or undertones. In fact, it still looks like semicolon-underscore-semicolon to me, but perhaps with some practice (>_<) I can learn (O_O) to see the faces, not the trees (@_@). One last fun tidbit from the Wikipedia entry:

The creator of the original ASCII emoticons :-) and :-(, with a specific suggestion that they be used to express emotion, was Scott Fahlman; the text of his original proposal, posted to the Carnegie Mellon University computer science general board on 19 September 1982 (11:44), was considered lost for a long time. It was however recovered twenty years later by Jeff Baird, from old backup tapes.[6]

19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman :-)
From: Scott E Fahlman (Fahlman at Cmu-20c)

I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:

:-)

Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark
things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use

:-(

Yes, this Scott Fahlman, who even devotes a page to the story of the smiley.