emoticons

[Lynne Murphy]

--On Friday, February 2, 2001 3:48 pm -0500 Drew Danielson
<drew.danielson at CMU.EDU> wrote:

> Thinking more about the history of emoticons, their precedent seems to
> me to be the smiley faces and whatnot drawn in notes passed in class and
> other informal, handwritten correspondence.  Whether that has any
> relevance to the history of English orthography, I cannot say.

I exchange word-processed letters with a friend, and he's taken to use the
smiley emoticon in what are otherwise fairly expressive and well-edited
passages of prose.  (Which seems like a step away from the e-mail use and
into other forms of writing.)  MS-Word, when I type in ":)", automatically
changes it to a smiley dingbat--I learned this when writing something
parenthetical about long vowels.  Maybe the smiley dingbat should be
imported into the IPA.

Lynne

M Lynne Murphy
Lecturer in Linguistics
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

phone +44-(0)1273-678844
fax   +44-(0)1273-671320