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?<\/p>\n
Guess not!<\/p>\n
Thanks to Ravenous Rob<\/a>, 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<\/a> 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 (@_@). \n\nOne last fun tidbit from the Wikipedia entry:\n\n\n I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:<\/p>\n :-)<\/p>\n Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark :-(\nThe 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]
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\n19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman :-)
\nFrom: Scott E Fahlman (Fahlman at Cmu-20c)<\/p>\n
\nthings that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use<\/p>\n
\n<\/tt>\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n