It might seem that emoticons are an invention of modern technology, which was supposed to help us communicate emotions through the language of digital communication. However, it turns out that the expressive character sequences that now accompany us practically every day were first presented more than 100 years ago.
The whole world thinks that the first emoticons appeared there
Foreign publications report that today marks the 142nd anniversary of the publication of the first documented emoticons. On March 30, 1881, four vertical emoticons appeared in the pages of the American satirical magazine “Puck”, which were placed in the “typographic art” column.
The presented “faces” represent respectively joy, melancholy, indifference and surprise. The creators of the magazine wrote an introduction in which they write: “It is important for us to show the public, and also all living cartoonists, what we are able to create with our printing tools.” However, fearing readers’ reactions to this innovation, they decided to present only four “faces”:
For fear of causing social unrest, we give only a small example of the artistic achievements within our reach – this is the first part. Below we present our Passion and Emotion Study. No copyright.
“Puck” was an American satirical magazine in which a large part was devoted to political topics. It was published in the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century in English and German editions. It is a shared repository of digital libraries, including content digitized by the Google Books and Internet Archive projects, as well as materials from local digital libraries.
“You praise others, you do not know your own”
However, on the Internet you can come across a mention that says that the idea of ​​typographic emoticons composed of characters appeared a few weeks earlier in a Polish newspaper. In the issue of “Kurjer Warszawski” of March 5, 1881, eight prototype emoticons appeared in the “Figiel” column, which are described as:
Two series of drawings of faces, made only with the use of typographic characters, and yet having different expressions.
It is also written that they found this interesting “prank” in two other magazines – one from St. Petersburg, and the other signed enigmatically as “foreign”. Nevertheless, it is certainly not about the American “Puck”, whose edition with “typographic art” did not appear until several weeks later.
Screenshot from “Kurjer Warszawski” from March 5, 1881 Polona
The first traces of emoticons can be found in the 16th century!
The modern emoticon was first used on September 19, 1982. Professor Scott Fahlman of Carnegie Mellon University drew the strings “:-)” and “:-(” on a blackboard, suggesting that we should use them to distinguish between jokes and serious posts.
However, the man was not the first person to come up with such an idea, because, as you can see above, already in the 19th century, attempts were made to show emotions in the text using “typographic art”. But you can also come across information that the first emoticons could be used much earlier than in 1881.
In the era of Abraham Lincoln, the “winking smiley face” was used in an 1862 account of his speech. . However, nowadays it is considered a typo.
The same is true of one of the poems of the British poet Robert Herrick. In the piece “” from 1648, a smiling face appears after the words “(smiling yet:)” (eng. “I still smile”). This is also considered a typo, and the association with the word “smiling” is accidental.
However, nowadays, emoticons are increasingly being replaced by “emoji”, i.e. the so-called. picture emoticons. The word “emoji” is derived from the Japanese words “picture” (e) + “letter” (moji), and the coincidence with the name “emoticon” is supposedly accidental. Unlike emoticons, in addition to human emotions, they also include objects, places, types of weather, plants, animals and are used to emphasize messages.
Emoji owes its popularity mainly thanks to social media, which we can also use with smartphones. Since 2010, they have been strictly controlled by the Unicode Consortium, which approves the designs of new emojis, which can then be used by all of us.
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Source: Gazeta
Bruce is a talented author and journalist with a passion for entertainment . He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he has established himself as a respected voice in the industry.
