Hey, I just noticed: Why doesn’t the “Wally” require a colon at either end?
- Jinx
That’s a lack shared by:
;j 
:o and 
Maybe, WAG, because “wally” isn’t easily mistaken as a word?
But ‘wally’ is a word. It means ‘fool’. Maybe it’s just a British thing.
Since the smile works without a closing : then obviously it’s just a naming convention to surround the word with :'s.
So I’d guess the answer is whomever set the smiley up just didn’t add the final : in because they forgot, didn’t know about the convention or something like that.
In some parts of the UK, it is also a slang term meaning picked cucumber.
You can put anything into that substitution table. You don’t even need a starting ; or ;
If Kleenex, on their message board, wanted every occurrance of “kleenex” to be automatically converted to a logo icon of “Kleenex®”, that’s how they’d do it.
Whoever did it, probably jdavis the tech admin, undoubtedly just cloned and modified one of the other emoticons.
When ;j [ ; j ] was chosen, it was copied from [ ; ) ] and :wally [ : wally] from [ : ) ]
I hate to yell ‘site’, but I have a friend named Wally and I would love to bust his stones with this…
Here’s a few for silly/foolish
http://dictionary.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=88955&dict=CALD
http://poets.notredame.ac.jp/cgi-bin/wn
http://lookwayup.com/lwu.exe/lwu/d?w=wally&st=&t=&h=&s=f&b=
http://www.dict.org/bin/Dict
and one for “fine, sturdy”
Hey Guys
Believe it or not Wally Smilie is a person living in Australia
But no longer here on the SDMB.
Since this is an old topic and not very relevant anymore, I’m going to close it.