I suppose everything has an anniversary. Today is the 25th anniversary of the sideways smiley face.

On September 19, 1982, at exactly 11:44 a.m., a Carnegie Mellon University professor named Scott Fahlman typed this message in an on-line electronic bulletin board:

I propose the following character sequence for joke markers:

:-)

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

:-(

Professor Fahlman asserts that he probably was the first to use this–he has seen no evidence that anyone used it before this date, although he concedes that it is a fairly simple concept.

It’s unclear when people started modifying this concept to connote different sentiments, such as surprise :-o sticking out one’s tongue :-p anger >:-{ or “you know what I mean, hint hint, wink wink” ;-) (Note: my apologies for the lack of punctuation in this last sentence. As it turns out, it’s hard to punctuate a sentence about use of punctuation to make facial expressions. See also Scott Johnston’s blog entry noting the difficulty of using smiley faces at the end of a parenthetical.) My guess, however, is that this trend started around 11:45 that same morning.

With all due respect to Professor Fahlman, I can’t stand these things. I suppose they’re harmless enough, but why not use language to express your meaning? Moreover, this simple language shortcut is the apparent parent to the obnoxious little emoticons that now pop up everywhere, even when you don’t want them to. As a PRIME EXAMPLE, WordPress converted my smileys here into emoticons when I saved this entry; I had to dig around in the WordPress options to find a setting that would turn these off so they would remain as intended. How annoying.

I suppose the only argument in favor of the smiley face is to ensure that the reader understands intended tongue in cheek. In the cold, sterile environment of email or text messaging, it is fairly easy to misinterpret the author’s tone and meaning. Even so, try to use words.