16
kiki
1y

The idea of a smiley face in text wasn’t invented by Scott Fahlman in 1982. It was invented by a Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov. In his 1969 interview for the New York Times, to whether he considers himself a modern writer, he replied:

“I think that in typography there should be a symbol that conveys a smile, a bit like a paren laying on its side. I would use precisely that symbol to reply to your question”.

This is why russian, Ukrainian and other people still use “)” as a smiley face still, instead of Western “:)” and “:-)”. We sometimes add more parens, like “)))))))” instead of “xD” or “:D”.

Comments
  • 2
    ))))))))
  • 2
    That's cringe
  • 0
  • 4
    Interestingly enough, I accomodated to typing "xD" instead of ")))))" since learning international pop culture. Last time I remember typing so much parentheses was 2 years ago.
  • 4
    Also

  • 0
    Always :)))))))

    Btw nice contextual image
  • 7
    AFAIK it was said somewhere that Asian people tend to prefer things like "^^" and "^_^" with the idea that eyes convey more than the mouth does.
  • 6
    actually, the idea of "a smiley face in text" is probably as old as printing itself.

    here's a sample from 1893: https://reddit.com/r/de/...
  • 1
    just to be different =]
  • 2
    @tosensei they had horizontal parenthesis 🤯
  • 2
    @tosensei this is an exercise in ASCII-art, but before it was a thing. People didn't paste those elaborate faces every time they wanted to convey the idea of saying something with a smile on their faces. It wasn't a cultural phenomenon.

    Nice material though, I didn't know about this particular case
  • 2
    Thanks to Unicode, we can use proper smileys now 😎
  • 1
    This makes so much in my work history make so much more sense now.
  • 0
    @iiii vk vibes innit
  • 0
  • 0
    LoL, it dates back even more. The ancestors of humans where all writing pictograph
  • 5
    @Oktokolo can't even to explain how it pisses me having to replace the unicode one back to ascii everytime something thinks it's sooo clever it does the replacement automatically.
  • 1
    @qwwerty Yeah, it is always bad when software tries to be smarter than the user (even if it often is) and auto-corrects/formats stuff. Especially annoying on paste but also the default in lots of applications and some forum software.
  • 1
    @kiki thank you for your often enlightening posts, please keep doing that. I love little did-you-know snacks.
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