Remember When Smileys Were Cool?
When I was in high school, I was Queen of the Internet. You didn’t know? What rock were you hiding under? I was totally Queen! I was! I swear!
Okay, fine. I wasn’t Queen. I was a pauper wearing a pretty dress. Fine.
I was, however, exceptionally good at instant messenger. I was capable of having multiple IM conversations at once. Even as many as ten or more. This drove my mother absolutely batty.
My mom has always liked to know what’s going on in my life. She would poke her head into the office where the computer was, and watch me alt-tab my way around, typing at my ridiculous speed. She would sometimes get angry, thinking that I was hiding things from her, because she couldn’t read the IM windows as fast as I cycled through them. But I wasn’t doing any such thing – that’s just how I existed. My social life was anti-social.
I told some friends at work about this IM über-skill and they told me it wasn’t anything to be proud of. Yet, I share it on the internet anyway. What’s wrong with me?
Anyway, back in the day of AOL and IM and AIM-bombs and personal webpages with no content and frame wars and webrings, I was Queen. (I say so, so it is true!) I had all of those things in my control. I even had a proto-blog where I whined about my crappy minimum wage job. And while all of this happened, smileys were evolving.
First, it was :-) and :-(. But I found those to be too tedious to type, so I went with the :) model. My left-handed friend wanted to be special, so he went this way (=. There was ;) and :/ and :P. And the smileys weren’t always enough. Sometimes you had to resort to text *g* for grin and *rae* for “raising an eyebrow” (a skill which I actually possess… but only for my left eyebrow… someday I will conquer the ability to raise either eyebrow independently, and then I will conquer the world!). There was brb, afk, and bak (because “back” was too hard to spell out); and there was lol, rotfl, and rotflmao (I once saw someone try to pronounce that as if it were a word…). There were abbreviations you needed codes to look up before you could begin to understand.
But the greatest of all of these was by far the smileys.
On Monday, my next-cube-neighbor at work and I came to the same conclusion involving a department-wide email. We simultaneously IMed each other the same sentiment, and things got out of hand from there. I’ll let you take a look for yourself. The first two smileys were ones from AIM’s drop down list that you may recognize.
me: :-P
him: >:o
me: Why isn’t there a “snarky-smiley”
me: I would draw such a thing like this
him: Oh, were you snarky? I was actually pissed.
me: >:~/
him: Kidding of course
him: Wow…
me: No… it gets better
him: Your nose gets crooked when you’re snarky.
me: Never mind
me: I cannot improve on the original
me: Of course it does[At this point, I stood up to demonstrate my snarky face, in which my nose is definitely crooked.]
him: |=&(:^>)~
him: Okay, that’s the silliest one I have ever come up with
me: Interesting hat…
me: And also beard?
him: Yes. Chef’s hat, with crazy & hair
me: But only one whisker?
him: Well, he’s a villainous chef. He spends all day twirling the beard, so it appears to be only one strand.
me: Ah, how very stealthy.
me: Stealthy?
me: What?
me: Uh… how very … uh… evil!
him: Yup.– IM conversation from approximately noon on Monday, January 23
– Spelling was changed to protect the innocent.
– Content was not.
I’m partial to the heavy metal one.
\m/ \m/
Ahh smileys. Actually it’s funny because I was just having his discussion with someone the other day. He is not a smiley user. In what I would predict to be about 10 hours of AIM conversations he has used 2 smileys. I on the other hand use one every 4-5 messages. (Thankfully he has no problem with the use of smileys by others.) Back in high school I would say my most use smiley was the equal sign happy smiley w/o nose =)
i use :) often. but i try to limit myself when speaking to peers of the same generation. once, i wrote an e-mail to a friend of my mom’s generation and she later told me that she could not figure out for the life of her what i was sticking in parentheses and as i use a lot of :)’s it must have been really confusing!