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Emoticon anniversary, Snopes
Sep. 28th, 2007 11:21 amSome of you may have noticed that this year is being called the 25th anniversary of the smiley. Snopes (a wonderful urban legend resource) disagrees: check their citation. Normally I find Snopes to be well-researched, but I find this article to be off.
( What I sent them: (behind the cut) )
Thoughts? What do you think qualifies as an emoticon?
EDIT: Okay, I'm spending way too much time on this, but here are a couple of sites worth mentioning:
A "languagelog" site that gives a rather complete history of emoticons and (I should have looked here first) the wikipedia entry for emoticons. In both, they refer to the 1982 e-mail as the origin of what are now called emoticons. But they also reference similar symbolic usage (including the Aunt Ev -) symbol and some very creative strike-through symbols) as "proto-emoticons."
This means that the common usage of emoticon is maintained, and gets to celebrate its 25th in spite of snopes, but also puts the emoticon into historical perspective with its (pardon the pun) precursors.
( What I sent them: (behind the cut) )
Thoughts? What do you think qualifies as an emoticon?
EDIT: Okay, I'm spending way too much time on this, but here are a couple of sites worth mentioning:
A "languagelog" site that gives a rather complete history of emoticons and (I should have looked here first) the wikipedia entry for emoticons. In both, they refer to the 1982 e-mail as the origin of what are now called emoticons. But they also reference similar symbolic usage (including the Aunt Ev -) symbol and some very creative strike-through symbols) as "proto-emoticons."
This means that the common usage of emoticon is maintained, and gets to celebrate its 25th in spite of snopes, but also puts the emoticon into historical perspective with its (pardon the pun) precursors.
