Emoticons: The Way of Text Life

 In the world of text messaging, a free Globe load and the alphanumeric characters aren’t the ones that matters. What is a text message without cute and expressive emoticons? It will be dull, lifeless and plain. However, you must not go overboard by typing horde of emoticons in your messages. Especially, if you are sending an excuse to your supervisor that you will unable to report for work. Is it proper to include a winking face ;-) at the end of the text? It will be safer if you limit the usage of emoticons to friends, relatives, or close acquaintances only.

Where did this graphical art originate? Believe it or not, it started with a formal proposal on the online bulletin board (bboard) of Carnegie Mellon University. On September 19, 1982, in the Computer Science department of the said university, a group of professors was discussing mundane things such as “…how the birds will sound after they have inhaled the Helium.” Okay, maybe that was not so mundane and – normal. As I was saying, someone opened a topic on, how could they distinguish if a post is a joke or not. In a bboard full of university professors, expect everyone to act as professional and formal as possible, that even an attempt to pull off a joke is taken seriously.

Until computer scientist Scott Fahlman butt in with this post:

That earned him, the “father of the smiley.” Surprisingly, a scientist invented the emoticon and it was not from the 1862 speech of the late president of the United States Abraham Lincoln as perceived by others. They just noticed that the winking smiley ;) was after the word “laughter” and presumed it was an “emoticon”. Yet some say it was just a typographical error. See it for yourself:

While the yellow smiley face was another matter and timeframe. It was a design for a button by a freelance artist named Harvey Ball to boost the employees’ morale at a recently merged insurance company. He created it on 1963 but only in the late 1970s the yellow smiley button became a craze.

The emoticon travelled a long crazy journey from a formal proposal to a thousand of variations we could choose from at any online social media sites and messenger apps. It also adapts based on the country’s culture and an example of this is the emoticon or “kaomoji” of Japan:

 

Western-Emoticon	Eastern-Kaomoji	Meaning
:-) :) :> =]	(^O^) (^o^) (^○^)（＾ｖ＾）	happy
:-( :( :< :-[	(T_T)  (Ｔ▽Ｔ)  T.T  Q_Q	sad

Compared to their Western counterpart (see above figure, left column), the eyes are more prominent because the desire of some Japanese to have larger eyes (middle column).

Out of our fellow Japanese inventiveness, they never settled using kaomojis. They created “emoji” which means “picture word”.  The examples we could cite are from WeChat, SnapChat and LINE messenger apps. They are more colorful and lively to look at compared to the plain alphanumeric characters.

What is the latest in our beloved emoticons? Matt Gray and Tom Scott are currently developing an emoji-only social network that will be soon available on iOS-supported devices – for now. It is not even released yet, but based on a Forbes report; Emojli has now 10,000 future users. You may register here if you are fond of icon-speak. This only shows that emoticons, kaomojis, and emojis have a great impact in the way we are communicating to one another. Words are not enough; it should have a kawaii factor.