Tag: EMOTICONS

Emoticons first appeared -- in rudimentary fashion -- over a century ago, but the online infestation of signifiers has definitely reached epidemic status. Nauseated by that scourge of smileys and winks, two valiant enemies of the emoticon have launched a campaign that urges everyone to -- at least temporarily -- spurn the annoying and inappropriate use of emotionally indicative symbols. ...

When Samsung's creative team was sitting around brainstorming names for the company's newest phone, they obviously wanted a moniker that would stick: something to entice its target audience, pique the interest of onlookers and, apparently, annoy the living bejeesus out of us. So, they decided to name it ':)'. Mission accomplished. Sure, the new phone features a QWERTY keyboard, runs T-Mobile's ...

Share The smiley emoticon, as we've already made clear, is perhaps the most annoyingly ambiguous glyph in our entire digital lexicon. Whether it pops up in texts, e-mails, or IMs, the smiley forces us to go digging for contextual clues that might tell us whether or not the person on the other side was really smiling, or if there was some ulterior, passive aggressive subtext at work. Well, now ...

For those of you who thought Herman Melville's 'Moby Dick' was too archaic, or just too hallowed, why not give a new translation a chance? According to the Telegraph, the epic novel about a man's quest for a white whale will be translated into Emoji -- a language based on the emoticons many Japanese use when sending messages via mobile devices. In order to accomplish this massive (and ridiculous) ...

According to Yahoo, 82-percent of those who use its Instant Messenger service like to portray feelings with emoticons in their correspondences. The other 18-percent probably loathe those little winks and smiles. If you've ever been on a message board, or used instant messaging, e-mail or text messages, then you've seen the little buggers, and at some point you've probably used one yourself. This ...

Well, it turns out all these fancy social networking tools we've grown to love so much aren't really all that new. Thanks to projects that have been digitizing newspaper archives, researchers have turned up references to "Face Book" and "Twitter" several decades before the Internet was even a glint in a military scientist's eye. An article from the August 24, 1902 edition of the Boston Daily ...

We really love it when people make outrageous claims that they, for example, own the trademark for an emoticon. Oleg Teterin, a Russian businessman and owner of Superfone (a mobile ad company), has trademarked the wink emoticon, ;-). Teterin says he has no intentions of going after individual users, but that he wants businesses to understand they will not get away with using his trademarked ...