Emoticon anniversary, Snopes

[javasaurus]

Some 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:
I love Snopes, and always check Snopes whenever I hear an outrageous story, to see if it’s true. However, in your recent article, “Glyph Notes,” about the 25th anniversary of the emoticon, I take some issue with the label, “false.” A single instance is provided as contradictory evidence: an issue of Raders Digest from 1967. First, “emoticon” usually implies electronic communication, not print (check dictionary.com). Secondly, the RD article uses the -) symbol to *approximate* a pictograph in written letters. If you are going to consider, against common usage, written communication pictographs as emoticons, then you could also cite elementary school teachers and their red smiley faces on my homework! Fahlman may not have been the first to use an emoticon, but I can’t accept the offered “evidence” as proof.

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.

Comments

[wilhelmina-d.livejournal.com]

I definitely think that emoticon is spefically online. the whole context of the idea is an online one. However, the smiley faces you reference seem to me to be irrelevant to the discussion. The reason Snopes' explanation has a standing is because the letter they reference specifically uses punctuation marks (the hyphen and the close parenth) to create the expression.

My $0.02.

[javasaurus.livejournal.com]

Yes, and no. They are citing an aunt's letter, in which she wrote (presumedly with pen on paper) a couple of squiggles (not punctuation) to represent tongue-in-cheek. The Readers Digest article uses the punctuation marks -) not as "tongue in cheek" but rather to approximate the symbols drawn by the aunt. Yes, I'm splitting hairs.
:-)

[wilhelmina-d.livejournal.com]

Well... they don't actually say. Yes, it says "write", but that could be in the general context of write a letter, which can be done by hand or machine. Typewriters were common in the 70s. I suppose we will never know. ;)