25 AND STILL SMILEY

Twenty-five years ago, Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman says, he was the first to use three keystrokes — a colon followed by a hyphen and a parenthesis — as a horizontal "smiley face" in a computer message. It was a serious contribution to the electronic lexicon. :-)

Language experts say the smiley face and other emotional icons, known as emoticons, have given people a concise way in e-mail and other electronic messages of expressing sentiments that otherwise would be difficult to detect.

Emoticons reflect the likely original purpose of language — to enable people to express emotion, said Clifford Nass, a professor of communications at Stanford University. The emotion behind a written sentence may be hard to discern because emotion is often conveyed through tone of voice, he said. "What emoticons do is essentially provide a mechanism to transmit emotion when you don't have the voice," Nass said. In some ways, he added, they also give people "the ability not to think as hard about the words they're using."

On a personal note, it is policy here that anyone in the UNP offices caught using a smiley during office hours is susceptible to severe and dire consequences.

While on the subject of smiling faces... Have you ever wanted to know who invented the YELLOW SMILEY FACE.