The Hindu : National : Smile through symbols

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Sunday, Jul 08, 2007
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National

Smile through symbols

Special Correspondent

Bangalore: It was Vladimir Nabokov, author of the controversial novel ‘Lolita’, who said almost 40 years ago: “I wish there was special typographical symbol for a smile.” Today of course, we have no such problem. Inveterate e-mailers amongst us, almost absentmindedly attach the string of characters which goes :-) whenever we want to share a smile with the recipient. And if we want to frown, we can do that too by adding :-( to our mail. E-mail services have built on this and often provide a whole library of pictorial symbols or ‘smileys’ to express a whole range of emotions — hence their collective name: emoticon.

Few us of who routinely embellish our mail with these expressive symbols, may be aware that the smiley is older than the Internet as we know it today. In fact September marks the 25th anniversary of the year when Scott Fahlman a research professor at the Carnegie Mellon University in the U.S., suggested in an internal mail that the :-) symbol should be put on the subject line of bulletin-board postings that were non-serious in nature. In the closed community of scientists, who were creating what became the worldwide web, the smiley was a way of saying that you were privy to its secret language. Over the years, emoticons evolved into an extensive exicon, which often left many confused (symbolised by :-/ ). Then came the picture smiley – and the rest of us dummies could join in the fun.

Yahoo! has marked the up and coming silver jubilee by commissioning a survey among 40,000 YahooMail users. Of these 82 per cent say they use emoticons daily. The most popular emotion they convey is “happiness” ( 83%).

Generally people find it easier to convey love through a smiley rather than saying it in person... but it is no substitute to announcing a break-up. A small number (11-14 per cent) use emoticons to say “You’re fired!” — that may be the reason top-most industry honchos like Vodaphone’s Atul Sarin cannily wrote into their contracts that they can’t be fired via e-mail. If you are a closet emoticon artist, Yahoo has just launched an Emoticontest: They will add six new smileys, culminating in the anniversary week, choosing the best of the designs submitted to http://messenger.yahoo.com/emoticontest.php

Go ahead, and remember, smiley, and the world smiles with you – literally -- because Yahoo has promised to incorporate your face in the selected emoticon design.

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