the.com/smiley
Punctuation that caught feelings and never gave them back.
means A small sideways face built from punctuation marks (or its digital descendant, the emoji) used to signal tone or emotion in text.
from Traces to 1982, when computer scientist Scott Fahlman proposed :-) in an online bulletin board post at Carnegie Mellon, suggesting it to mark jokes after a thread about misread sarcasm went sideways. The word 'smiley' itself is just 'smile' plus the '-y' that turns things into cute nouns — the same pattern behind 'softy' or 'biggie' — and it got attached to the symbol almost immediately. The yellow circular smiley FACE (as opposed to the punctuation mark) has a separate, murkier commercial history from the 1960s, often tied to graphic artist Harvey Ball, though many hands likely touched its spread.
- birth year
- 1963, a 10-minute logo job
- creator's fee
- 45 dollars, no royalties, no regrets probably
- typed cousin
- :) predates it online by decades
- modern form
- now 3,600-plus emoji, still just grinning