Geekend
Complete article at following URL:
http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/geekend/?p=2205
- Date: March 24th, 2009
- Author: Jay Garmon
Theoretically, if you’ve ever typed a colon or semicolon in sequence with a parenthesis with the intent of indicating the emotional tone of a written statement, then you just might owe somebody a royalty fee. Contrary to all conventional wisdom, the use of certain emoticons — which is the term of art for those little smileys and frownies composed of punctuation marks — is trademarked in certain contexts. Seriously.
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The documented use of emoticons goes back more than a quarter century — and is older than the word emoticon itself. More to the point, the use of punctuation-based symbols to denote tone (especially sarcasm) is older still. No less a literary authority than Vladimir Nabokov told The New York Times in 1969 that, “I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile — some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket.” The ARPAnet was just getting the hang of packet-switching at that point, so it’s safe to say the idea of an emoticon predates the Internet.
By 1982, Internet-based communication was common enough that its regular users had recognized the need for something akin to the “supine round bracket” that Nabokov proposed — and somebody said so. While many users probably independently solved the problem, one man gets credit for launching the emoticon concept — if not the word — into the online lexicon.
WHO IS CREDITED WITH INTRODUCING THE SMILEY EMOTICON TO THE INTERNET?