‘Hi there! Happy face. Great to see you again. Wink. Oh, you can’t meet me later? Frown.’ Surely only a planet full of absolute cretins would communicate this way with one another?

“But it’s not an automatic signal; it’s a kind of puzzle.” In a movie ... Most of us don’t cycle between emoticons; our faces contain a shifting portrait of feeling.

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. To mark the anniversary Wednesday ...

Sure%2C facial looks can powerfully communicate%2C but emoticons are bare-bones imitations. Words allow us to communicate far more complex ideas and emotions. Most Facebook users don't routinely ...

People with home computers and internet connections were able to post the original emoticons as well as their variants, like 😉 as a winking face and >:-( as an angry face. Typography continued ...