REAL LIFE NEWS: THE REAL FIRST EMOTICONby HazedAnother follow-up story: a month ago I wrote about the guy who said he had invented the smiley, which it was claimed was the first use of an emoticon. But recently I found out it's not, thanks to the Snopes.com website, which exists to confirm or debunk facts, urban legends, and things that "everybody knows". According to their research, while the Carnegie Mellon professor may have been the first person to suggest the exact use of the :) to make a sideways smiley face, he was not the first person to use an emoticon - that is, a combination of letters and other characters that combined together look like a picture of a facial expression. For that, you need to look all the way back to 1967, where an issue of Reader's Digest prints a letter demonstrating what can only be described as an emoticon - a "tongue in cheek" glyph to signify sarcasm. Take a look at the Snopes report here. |