The Literature Network - Don't smile, I'm x

Don't smile, I'm x_x.(News)

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From: The Mercury (South Africa)
Date: 20070123
Author:

SOME e-mailers might be surprised to learn, as I did the other day, that the history of the "smiley", or emoticon, goes back nearly a century. It was in 1912 that the humorist Ambrose Bierce proposed "an improvement in punctuation - the snigger point".

He suggested: "It is written thus \__/! and presents, as near as may be, a smiling mouth. It is to be appended with an exclamation mark to every jocular or ironical sentence."

The smiley and the frowney have come a long way since then. As far as I know, they appear as :-) and :-( and are meant to be looked at sideways, with ...

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