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It's a birthday that all of us can celebrate. Today the smiley face formed by tying a colon, hyphen, and parentheses is 25 years old. At 11:44 AM on September 19, 1982, Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman typed the symbol on an early online message board, proposing that :-) be used to to denote a comment meant to be taken lightly.
Now known as emoticons, these smiley faces have dozens of different variations, and messaging programs like AOL Instant Messenger transform ;) into a colorful figure that can be customized. I have Groucho Marx smiley faces. Pretty cool stuff.
Smiley faces have even crept into more formal business-related communications as the New York Times notes:
More than once, Alexis Feldman, the director of the Feldman Realty Group, a commercial real estate company in Manhattan, has been moving forward on a major deal when, she said, "at the 23rd hour, I get an e-mail from the broker saying, 'Sorry, my client is not interested in the space, too bad we couldn't make the big bucks' - then there's a frown face!"
"I mean, it's ludicrous," said Ms. Feldman, 25. "I'm not going to feel better about losing hundreds of thousands of dollars because someone puts a frown face to regretfully inform me."
Perhaps some discretion is required for the use of emoticons. Other birthdays for today include Jimmy Fallon, Marc Jacobs, Soledad O'Brien, Trisha Yearwood, and Jim Abbot. I wish all of them a :-) birthday.
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