World Emoticon Day

Today, July 17 is World Emoticon Day. Even though I never use them, I know many of my friends do and send them to me to express their feelings, always happy and smiling ones, and never, never in anger, but only a few times in disappointment – the reason is because I did not put my daily post in my blog on time. Of course, a smiley followed immediately.

An emoticon is short for "emotion icon", and is a pictorial representation of a facial expression using characters, usually punctuation marks, numbers, and letters, to express a person’s feelings or moods, or as a time-saving method. The first ASCII emoticons, :-) and :-(, were written by Scott Fahlman in 1982, but emoticons actually originated on the Plato IV computer system in 1972. As SMS and the internet became widespread in the late 1990s, emoticons became increasingly popular and were commonly used on text messages, internet, and e-mails. Emoticons have played a significant role in communication through technology, and some devices and applications have provided stylized pictures that do not use text punctuation. They offer another range of "tone" and feeling through texting that portrays specific emotions through facial gestures while in the midst of text-based cyber communication.

In 1963, the "smiley face", a yellow button with two black dots representing eyes and an upturned thick curve representing a mouth was created by freelance artist Harvey Ball. It was realized on order of a large insurance company as part of a campaign to bolster the morale of its employees and soon became a big hit. This smiley presumably inspired many later emoticons; the most basic graphic emoticon that depicts this is, in fact, a small yellow smiley face. More recent emoticons are being called Emojis.