I have decided I do not like smiley faces in written communication. I think my biggest complaint is that it is the equivalent of saying "Ha Ha!" which I have always considered a rather juvenile practice.
The smiley face is the original emoticon, those emotion icons that are meant to convey to the reader the mood of the writer. It came out of IT and has become a staple of electronic communication.
It all started in 1982 when a dude named Scott Fahlman at Carnegie Melon University proposed to the computer science department that they use :-) (colon-hyphen-right parenthesis, read sideways) as a "joke marker" in their postings to electronic message boards. He then went on to suggest that perhaps it would be better to use the left parenthesis instead to indicate when something was not a joke. The practice spread and was picked up by computer nerds everywhere, eventually finding its way to the incipient Internet, and the rest is history.
Although emoticons can still be created with the symbols available on the standard keyboard, there are many programs that allow the insertion of actual images, and some applications will even automatically change :-) to J .
I do not use smiley faces myself, or haven't in a long time, as far as I remember. I admit, however, that I do occasionally poke fun at something or somebody by putting [smiley face] at the end of the sentence instead of the image, just to be cute.
The real point here is that if you can't tell when I'm kidding, then I am not communicating very well, or you do not know me very well, or you are really stupid. Ha ha! Just kidding.
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