The Father of the Emoticon Chases His Great White Whale | Hacker News Reader

The Father of the Emoticon Chases His Great White Whale

narratively.com

28 pointskawera10 comments

Snope says it's false: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/glyph-notes/

"he may even have invented the form of emoticon meant to be read with one’s head tilted to the left"

Congrats to Snopes for tracking down an earlier use, but it was the :-) smilie that caught on, and people didn't get it from Readers' Digest. So although the 1982 message wasn't the first-ever emoticon it was the one that got the Internet (or more specifically Usenet) using emoticons.

It's similar to pointing out that Christopher Columbus didn't "discover America" even from a Eurocentric perspective because others were first. Those other early settlements died out; Columbus changed everything.

There were emoticons in Puck magazine in the 1880s, so to suggest that someone invented the smiley face a hundred years later is kind of reaching...

They do mention that in the article:

"Fahlman also readily admits that he did not invent the emoticon all on his own. There’s evidence that both the idea, and the thing itself, existed prior to his office antics. A century ago, copy-setters at a satirical magazine jokingly created typographical “studies in passion and emotions” designed to look like faces. Fahlman only credits himself for the smiley’s “turn your head to one side principle” and its particular colon-hyphen-parenthesis combination of characters."

According to Mitchell and Webb [0], Thomas Hardy wanted to end 'Jude The Obscure' (IIRC) with a sad face smiley just in case people hadn't realised that it was supposed to be a sad novel.

[0] That Mitchell & Webb Sound, Series 5, 2015

And here is an emoji from 1913 [0], accompanied with a footnote: "The author felt the need to enrich the Polish spelling with a new symbol, which he dares name wink. This symbol, whose absence was till now sorely felt, particularly in lyric poetry, should soon become as indispensable as the colon, dash, exclamation mark, etc."

Given the words of the poem, the similarity of the emoji to a female sexual organ is not accidental IMHO.

[0] https://pl.wikisource.org/wiki/Strona:PL_Tadeusz_Boy-%C5%BBe...

Actually, the first written example is in Shakespeare's 1st folio - https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2013/02/shakespeare-and-emoticons/

I was trying to read this story with https://fullhn.com, but something was wrong with narratively.com (or fullhn) and it took me to this harrowing story instead, which I think is well worth reading - it's at the intersection of homeless issues and juvenile justice: "An American Tragedy: The Colorful Life and Shocking Death of Ovid Neal III" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25258116)

Buried under a lot of faffing about over emoticons, a lucid criticism of the research field named AI:

>> He laments that AI as a field has largely moved away from its original goal. Since the mid 1980s, the information explosion combined with the exponential growth in computing power has generated huge commercial interest in developing specialized AI technologies. An influx of money shifted research focus away from creating a general intelligence to specific statistical learning that could be used by industry.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com