They're called smileys (or emoticons, if you want to sound technical about it), and you won't travel far in cyberspace without coming across them. If you've ever received email, you probably know the most common ones already. If you're the sort of person who spends half of your life talking to people via the Internet, you're probably as fluent in smileyish as you are in your native tongue. For a lot of us, though, they can be like stumbling upon an unfamilar foreign language.

In fact, smileys are the new lingua franca of the electronic communications age. It doesn't even matter if you don't know your (Roman) alphabet; they mean the same if you understand only Hebrew or Arabic, Japanese or German. Like Keep Left signs and the Coca Cola logo, they can be read by the illiterate as well as the literati. They are, in short, the perfect means of communication for the Global Village Idiot.

They originated, however, among the Global Village Geniuses of American computer science. Back in 1981, soon after US scientists first initiated the trend whereby people stopped talking to each other and started sending emails instead, Scott E Fahlman, now a principal research scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, realised that there was a problem with this method of communication: in cyberspace no-one can tell when you're joking.

"People were making sarcastic comments in email posts, others were taking them more seriously than they were intended (no body language on the Net), and silly arguments were breaking out," he says. So he suggested on one of the Internet bulletin boards that people label comments not meant to be serious with a :-) glyph. "Very quickly this idea spread all around the world and others started creating clever variations on the theme. The awful term 'emoticons' is much more recent."

The basic smiley :-) (for those of you who haven't come across them yet, you have to tilt your head sideways to get an idea of their meaning) was soon followed by the basic unsmiley :-( -- which can either mean "I'm sad" or, alternatively, "You're sad, please stop sending me your unfunny emails". Then came the winking smiley ;-) which allowed people who never learnt how to wink properly in real life to become complete winkers on their computer screens.

As computer body languages go, the early emoticons conveyed a fairly limited range of emotions. You could cry :'-( from either eye :,-( or you could laugh :-D or express surprise :-o or doubt :-/. But what people really wanted once electronic communications had moved out of the science faculties and into the office was to be able to convey the whole gamut of human emotions by way of a few strokes on their computer keyboards. Above all, they wanted to be able to fulfill those two basic human requirements that make life in any office bearable -- the ability to flirt with your work colleagues, and to bitch about them.

The ability to flirt by emoticon came first. After the smiley wink came the smiley cheeky devil >:-> and then the cheeky winking devil >;-> and then the cheeky winking devil who's capable of doing unspeakable things with his tongue >;->~ Things went downhill from then on. The smiley glyph +>:-)~ was invented to represent a priest who can do unspeakable things with his tongue, while someone came up with +O:-)~ to make a similar point about the Pope. If you bear in mind that .-) is the glyph for someone with one eye, moreover, you should get the general idea why >,->~~ is meant to suggest that it's not only in the kingdom of the blind that the one-eyed man can be king. Sending someone a smiley rose {@>;>->------ seems very tame after that.

The ability to bitch by emoticon was more of a challenge for the smiley-makers. But it didn't take long for the essential building blocks of bitchiness to make their way off the computer keyboard. The smiley :-----) was quickly conceived as a handy way of calling someone a liar (you could always say the key had stuck if you were challenged about it). Using [:] meant someone was like a robot, while {:-) facilitated snide references to the boss's toupee (and }:-) allowed you a giggle about it on a windy day). And there were plenty more where they came from, such as :*) for drunk, :*)) for very drunk, %-/ for hungover and %-6 for hungover and brain dead. These would sometimes be accompanied by :*)) :-- which hopefully tells its own story. Oh yes, and :-() was always available to describe the office blabbermouth who spread these sorts of comments around.

Given the uses that smileys can be put to, it's probably not surprising that some people have taken exception to them altogether. After recent cases involving the use of companies' internal email systems, the first case of sexual harassment by emoticon can't be far off. And in the US (where else?), some companies have even adopted codes of conduct about when and how they may be used. David Angell and Brent Heslop, authors of the US publication, The Elements of E-mail Style, inform their readers ratehr sternly that smileys are the equivalent of email slang and are "inappropriate" for business communications.

It's also best to be cautious about the use of smileyish in communications with people in some far eastern countries. This is particularly so in Japan, where they prefer more formal, upright versions (no pain-in-the-neck smileys there). These originated in the art of anime, Japanese animation, in which the characters eyes turn into upside-down v's when they are extremely happy. The main Japanese smileys include:

The Japanese don't seem to have any commonly used smileys showing sadness or anger, perhaps because their strict code of politeness shies away from giving any possible offence (and you thought the British could be stiff). And in case you were wondering why the female smiley ^.^ is different to that for a male, it's because it is still considered impolite in Japan for a woman to show her teeth when smiling.

All of which makes you wonder what the Japanese would make of some of the more abusive smileys doing the rounds in the western electronic communication systems. Just don't send them one that looks like this, that's all <=====8-) (and sorry, you'll have to work it out for yourself).

 

How to talk smiley: a quick guide to emoticons

Anime smileys
(No need for the pain in the neck)