The origins of the emoticon 19 Sep 2008

Wired has a nice little article on the origins of the emoticon. While it's a fairly well-known fact that Scott Fahlman posted the first examples on a computer-science department bulletin board at Carnegie Mellon University on 19 September 1982, we (foolishly) hadn't realised that they had been around in one form or another for a lot longer...

According to Wired, the practice goes back to at least the mid-19th century, when Morse code symbols were occasionally used for the same purpose...and first appeared in print in 1881, when the American satirical magazine Puck published emoticions using hand-set type. (Apparently, Ambrose Bierce, of The Devil's Dictionary fame, suggested using what he called "snigger points" - \__/ - to convey jocularity or irony!)