Why didn’t smilies develop earlier, i.e., in the pre-computer age?
I don’t mean the animated icons that are so over-used today, but the simple smilies created by keyboard characters and punctuation marks that required a reader to turn his or head sideways in order to “get” the smilie.
People used typewriters for more than a hundred years before computers became the primary way to generate text, and typewriters have the characters and punctuation marks needed to make smilies.
So why didn’t letters and other typed documents in the pre-computer age include smilies? What’s so radically different about viewing text on a screen rather than on a piece of paper that it spawned smilies?
My guess is that type-written documents were seen as relatively formal, and adding a humorous picture would not be appropriate in that context. You could add pictures to hand-written letters, and some people did, but in a handwritten document you were not limited to a small range of characters, so you could insert “:)” and not just “:**)”
One reason is that the popular yellow “smiley face” wasn’t drawn up until the early 1960s. The “smiley face” makes the colon-and-closed-parentheses connection more obvious than it might normally be.
That said, these images, from 1881, are of interest. Those early emoticons don’t look to be particularly usable in normal typewritten correspondence, however. Additionally, things spread through media much faster today than they did in 1881.
There was an air of formallity in type-written communication that isn’t present in IMs, chat and emails of today. I can remember high school in the 80s and there would be only one paper a year that was required to be typed. That was the big end of term paper you were supposed to be working on all year. My parents didn’t even have a working typewriter. I would speculate that access to typewriters was more limited, especially in demographics with the free time (i.e. not using the typewriter at work, or as your work) to come up with smilies.
WAG: typed correspondence would have tended to be business-related so adding smilies would have been unprofessional. As emails and message boards proliferated and typed communication became less formal, decorative text became widespread.
I’d wager that, in your professional correspondence via email, you tend not to include smilies.
ETA: damn real life interfering with importnt stuff like the Dope!
This was in informal things. There was some use in telegrams. There was some use in science fiction fanzines. There were random other cases of the use of smilies. Everything has a previous history.
I’ve seen references to them used in the written form of a speech (i.e., the notes the speaker would have at the podium), as shorthand for places where the speaker ought to pause and smile (or frown) at the audience.
I’m somewhat of a telegraphy buff, and my impression is that in the golden age of telegrams, people would use any sort of cipher that could shorten the message to save on the fees. There were commercially available books with lists of abbreviations or numerical codes that could be used as a substitute for numbers, and people would also make up their own schemes to which only they and the recipient were privy. So I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that icons similar to smileys were used in telegrams.
There’s an interesting U.S. Supreme Court case, Primrose vs Western Union of 1894, which I can’t resist to quote here because it gives a good example of these ciphers. A commercial wool trader telegraphed an agent of his company
which, in their cipher, was intended to mean
The telegraph operators mixed up the message; they substituted “Destroy” for “Despot” (changing “fifteenth” to “seventeenth”), but, more importantly, the delivered message said “buy” instead of “bay” (remember that, in Morse code, the difference between an A and a U is just an additional dot). Now the message was not a notice that the sender had bought 500,000 pounds of wool, but an instruction to the recipient to do so.
As a result, the sender suffered a loss of $20,000, which he wanted to recover from Western Union. The Court ruled that the sender could recover only the fee of the telegram, which was $1.15.
Don’t forget that one use of smilies is to convey your meaning in situations where someone might misinterpret you - for instance, if you’re joking about something and want to be sure they don’t take you seriously. This is quite likely when communicating online, particularly on a message board where some people might read it who have poor English skills and don’t know you personally. When typing a letter it’s less likely that you’re going to need smilies, either because it’s a business letter or because you are addressing a friend or family member who knows you well.
