The Origin Of :-)

The now ubiquitous emoticon was coined by Carnegie Mellon students to convery sarcasm on a message board in the ’80s:

Someone proposed an asterisk. Someone else, an ampersand (on the grounds that “&” resembles “a jolly fat man in convulsions of laughter”). And then a computer scientist named Scott Fahlman chimed in with the compound punctuation mark that would live on in chat windows and e‑mail inboxes the Internet over: “ :-) ”

“We were just nerds, goofing around,” Fahlman, now a research professor at Carnegie Mellon, told me. “This was not meant to be a serious invention.” But the smiley and its cousins succeeded where generations of misunderstood sarcasts had failed. In the late 1800s, the poet Alcanter de Brahm proposed a point d’ironie resembling a backward question mark—a suggestion echoed, a century later, by the novelist Hervé Bazin. Nabokov wanted “a special typographical sign for a smile—some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket.” Ambrose Bierce offered the “snigger point” (a horizontal parenthesis, or “”) to punctuate “every jocular or ironical sentence.”