Smile! You're on the Internet! :-)

Buccaneers aren't known for their cheery dispositions -- but September 19th marks something more than the annual Talk Like a Pirate Day: it's also the 25th anniversary of the smiley emoticon.

CNN.com reports that "Twenty-five years ago, Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman... posted the emoticon in a message to an online electronic bulletin board at 11:44 a.m. on September 19, 1982, during a discussion about the limits of online humor and how to denote comments meant to be taken lightly."

1982? That wasn't long before I joined the pre-Internet era of commercial online services. When I first popped into a CompuServe chat room (GO GAMERS), I was bombarded with a lexicon I found absolutely bewildering. Sentences would often be addressed to someone with the initials BTW, yet I saw no such person in the room. I finally asked who they were speaking to and was informed that BTW was more formally known as Mr. By The Way.

Many of the terms I used back then have fallen by the wayside, as predicted by Fahlman. "I don't think the smiley face was the beginning and the end," he said in the above article. "All people at all times take advantage of whatever means of communication they have." Just as the electronic smiley was made possible by my hometown's invention of the yellow smiley face, the electronic smiley has made way for more visual (and vertically-aligned) faces available in today's instant messenging programs. But in deference to that golden era of text-based telecommunications, I dusted off an old file that saved me much embarrassment back then and offer an excerpt of it for the education and reflection of all of today's surfers:

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CIS EXPRESSIONS V. 1.0

In 1988, members of the Gamer's Forum banded together to create a list of abbreviations and symbols found in the Forum, on CIS, and elsewhere. As it happens, there were already several such lists available: two EMOTICON lists (compiled/authored by James Bach [76555,273] and a SMILE.TXT file compiled by Joan Friedman [76701,145], SysOp of the WordPerfect Support Group Forum. SMILE.TXT contains the complete contents of both EMOTICON files. SMILE.TXT is now included in its entirety, followed by the contributions from Gamer's.

If you have any additions to this list, please contact Josho/Ass't SysOp [72250,1275] in Section 1. Thanks!

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These acronyms are frequently used as savers of bytes and time in CIS Forum messages.

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These "emoticons" [icons designating emotions] were originally uploaded to the IBMCOM Forum, DL6, in the files E-ICON.ARC and ICON2.ARC, and are posted here with the permission of the author, James Bach 76555,273.

EMOTICON.1

To help telecom-sters clarify just how humorous their postings are intended to be, here is a collection of the many faces of humor, emoticon-style.

emoticon: n. a figure created with the symbols on a keyboard that is read with the head tilted to the left. Used to convey the spirit in which a line of text was typed.

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* Tilt your head slightly to the left to read the following emoticons.
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