A Brief Cultural History of the Emoticon :-)

It’s a typically exciting Friday night. I'm sat in my room with a bottle of wine, weeping softly into the creased pages of Romeo and Juliet, when suddenly - ping! - my phone goes off. A text. A text! Resisting all impulses I leap-dive across the bed like a dog on heat and grab the phone. Could this be from that long-lost Tinder love?

-‘Hey you. Fancy going out for a few drinks tonight?’
For a second I think. Do I?
Of course I do. He knows I do. But I want to be clever so I try something sarcastic.
-‘I think not darling’
I hit send. I wait. Nothing. Why nothing? Then it occurs to me.
I forgot the ;-)

That’s the thing with electronic messages, they don't get sarcasm. Or irony. Or the full spectrum of human emotions. Oh god. And all because I forgot that one tiny emoticon.

When was the first emoticon invented anyway?

Below is a timeline for the curious. Reading it is guaranteed to mend all broken hearts and misunderstandings.\* \**Terms and conditions may apply ;-)*

THE EMOTICON: A HISTORICAL TIMELINE

1862 - The ;) symbol appears in Abraham Lincoln’s 1862 speech. This has been suggested by some as the very first use of an emoticon, but it could also just be a typo.

1881 - The US satirical magazine Puck publishes these characters to be used in print publications (image on the right):

1969 - In a New York Times interview in April, Alden Whitman asks writer Nabokov: “How do you rank yourself among writers (living) and of the immediate past?” Nabokov answers: “I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile - some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket, which I would now like to trace in reply to your question.”

1960s and 1970s - Originally designed in 1963 by freelance artist Harvey Ball for an insurance company, the yellow smiley face gets taken on by the Spain brothers who commercialise it on buttons, bumper stickers and mugs. The smiley becomes a symbol of ‘70s hippie culture and the ‘90s acid rave scene, and has presumably inspired many later emoticons.

1982 - Scott Fahlman, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon, first suggests using the smiley on a university message board. He proposes that posters to the newsgroup use a digital smiley face :-) and a virtual frown :-( to clarify the tone of their message.

1993 - The computer book publisher O’Reilly & Associates puts out a 93 page print emoticon dictionary compiled by David Sanderson entitled Smileys.

1990s - Around the same time a graduate astronomy student from the University of Maryland called James Marshall begins compiling an online emoticon dictionary which now has some 2,200 entries.

Present - The rise of instant messaging platforms convinced big tech companies to incorporate emoticons into their products. Apple, Microsoft and Facebook all now offer their own messaging apps, each with their own collections of numerous static and animated emoji.

Truly this is a time to be alive :D