September 19th was the 25th anniversary of the invention of the emoticon. Hoo-ha! garyg would have celebrated. The ACSII emoticon, read sideways, was invented, apparently, by a guy named Scott Fahlman.But hey. Didja know that proto-emoticons have been around for more years than have personal computers? I didn’t. I assumed, wrongly, that they were part of the information age. But no:

emoticon-like symbols also turned up from time to time before the age of online communication. Urban legend debunker Barbara Mikkelson of Snopes.com recently found just such a forerunner in the May 1967 issue of Reader’s Digest:

Many people write letters with strong expression in them, but my Aunt Ev is the only person I know who can write a facial expression. Aunt Ev’s expression is a symbol that looks like this: —) It represents her tongue stuck in her cheek. Here’s the way she used it in her last letter: “Your Cousin Vernie is a natural blonde again —) Will Wamsley is the new superintendent over at the factory. Marge Pinkleman says they tried to get her husband to take the job —) but he told them he couldn’t accept less that $12,000 a year —) “

(Reader’s Digest, May 1967, p. 160, citing Ralph Reppert of Baltimore’s Sunday Sun)

And even before typewriters were common, people were thinking about how printed symbols could be used to convey the ineffable:

if we’re going to extend the definition of emoticon to any expressive use of typographical symbols “to create a representation of the sender’s face,” then Ralph Reppert’s Aunt Ev is hardly the only pre-computer precursor. As previously noted here (and, indeed, on Scott Fahlman’s own site), Vladimir Nabokov made the following comment in an interview with Alden Whitman of the New York Times in April 1969:

Q: How do you rank yourself among writers (living) and of the immediate past?Nabokov: I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile – some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket, which I would now like to trace in reply to your question.

A “supine round bracket” would look something like this: . Like Aunt Ev’s tongue-in-cheek symbol, it’s meant to be viewed directly and not in the sideways orientation of modern emoticons. Unfortunately, the “supine round bracket” doesn’t match any symbol in standard typography, at least without manipulation. (Now there’s a Unicode character that fits the bill, U+23DD or ‘bottom parenthesis,’ though it’s not supported in all fonts. [John Wells emails to point out that the more appropriate symbol is U+2323 ’smile,’ which goes along with U+2322 ‘frown.’])As it happens, Ambrose Bierce had pretty much the same idea way back in 1887, and unlike Nabokov he actually put it on the printed page instead of just talking about it. In an essay entitled “For Brevity and Clarity,” Bierce proposes a number of reforms for the English language in his usual sardonic style.

my link

Bierce’s propositions include a parenthesis-on-its-side that would serve to demonstrate what he calls “the snigger point, or note of cachinnation“. I can’t reproduce it here right now, but this link will take you to an image of it in print.Language Log: The prehistory of emoticonsThanks to Harry for the link.