12:32 pm - :-)
Today is the 25th anniversary of the venerable smiley, so Happy Birthday :-)
Reportedly, after a bad joke on Carnegie Mellon University's bulletin boards in 1982 about a mercury leak caused "mild panic", it was decided that something had to be done to flag messages that were intended as jokes, the electronic medium lacking the tone-of-voice cue for humour.
It was suggested, rather mundanely, that these messages should be flagged with an asterisk in the subject line. Boring. Research programmer Keith Wright disagreed and suggested the ampersand: "Surely everyone will agree that the “&” symbol is the funniest character on the keyboard. It looks funny (like a jolly fat man in convulsions of laughter.) It sounds funny…I just know if I could get my nose into the vacuum [tubes of the computer monitor] it would even smell funny!” Other symbols were suggested, including the hash, because # looks like lips and teeth... apparently.
Then, at 11:44 on the 19th of September, Professor Scott E. Fahlman made a hurried post on the 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 curent trends. For this use:
:-(
And the rest, as they say (whoever they are), is history.
I knew it was old; I didn't realise it was five days older than me!
ETA: Oh, and yes, it is coincidence that International Talk Like a Pirate Day falls on the smiley's birthday. Yarr!
|
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
thegooseking's journal