First use of an emoticon in 1862? | Hacker News Reader

First use of an emoticon in 1862?

cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com

7 pointsdkasper10 comments

Wish it were true, but I don't buy it. The article has a link to the full text. Close to the end of the next paragraph, you see the following:

"I believe he is a brave and able man, (applause,)"

Looking over the whole text, the use of parantheses as oppposed to brackets is probably meant to indicate that the speaker does not pause, so the audience reaction overlaps. In such situations, commas and semi-colons make more sense. That is, as oppossed to the periods and exclamations that you see terminating the bracketed phrases.

Now back to hacking.

> Now back to hacking.

Off-topic, but does anyone else think that over the last few days HN started feeling a bit like Reddit?

Spelling and punctuation were much less standardized in the 19th century than they are today. We look at those symbols with a modern eye and we recognize patterns that we use today. But the way we interpret those symbols would likely be nothing similar to the way a person from 1862 would.

When I read a Lord Byron biography, and after seeing his prose in correspondences he struck me as a script kiddie, until I heard on NPR recently that they used contraptions to save on expensive ink and fit more words into the precious page.

Kind of like how very religious people see images of the Virgin Mary in rotten pieces of cheese.

If this is in fact an emoticon (which I doubt), it makes for interesting precedent in the how-do-you-end-emoticons-within-parenthesis debate.

I know we've become generally smarter over the years, but people weren't dumb back then, surely people noticed : and ; look like eyes, and ) looks like a smile from the very beginning of standardized punctuation...

People also weren't obstructed by the computer so much, and the smiley wasn't even invented yet. What I mean by the former is, that I found older books to contain all kinds of very curious typography. Not that I know a lot about it, but I think that the typesetter would in that case just make a custom piece, whereas the early computers certainly didn't have an easy way of embedding arbitrary symbols in text, thereby creating the 'need' for emoticons.

EDIT: that said, I was probably wrong with most of what I said. There's been typographical variants of 'faces' since 1881 or so: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smiley#Typographical_smileys But note how these differ a lot from what we are 'used' to. And I still doubt they'd been used in that way anyway.

It's mentioned near the end of the article, but vertical emoticons were already documented in 1881:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smiley

"Could it be? Was this just a typo, a mistake, or was the reporter, transcriber or typesetter having a bit of sly fun?"

I don't know. Ask Nostradamus.

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