Smiling in Cyberspace

OVER TIME, EVERYTHING THAT IS USEFUL seems to evolve into something bizarre. If you cruise the Internet or spend any time at all on CompuServe or America Online, you’ve probably encountered smileys, also known as “emoticons,” the purpose of which is to leaven the stark and faceless E-mail medium with shorthand signals that show some emotion. Viewed sideways, they make little faces.

Standard smiley usage in an E-mail is:

🙂 and means that the user was kidding and smiling when he called you a hopeless dork.

But smileys soon evolved to winking like this 😉 and then to laughing out loud :}>.

Then came :-[ which means, “I am not amused.”

Now, of course, they’re so far out there that, once again, nobody is quite sure what they mean.

Some of the weirder ones floating around cyberspace these days:

=|:-)> is your basic Abraham Lincoln or Uncle Sam.

=:o} can be Bill Clinton or W.C. Fields.

oCc:-) is Carmen Miranda, while

oCc 🙁 would be Carmen Miranda mad.

5:-) would be Elvis, who has been sighted on the Net.

Mick Jagger is represented with a :-O. And watch out for an evil chef with horns, glasses and a mustache, shown as C=>8-{.

Of what use are they? Obviously in many cases, precious little. And equally obvious, you can make up your own, but we wish you wouldn’t; E-mail is confusing enough as it is, you turkeys <:>==.