:-o really?
Annoying little emoticons may seem like a product of the texting era, but they date back to a New York humor magazine published more than a century ago.
Blame the March 30, 1881, edition of Puck magazine (above) for creating — as a joke — numerical symbols to represent moods, according to Scott Christianson, author of the new book “100 Diagrams That Changed the World.”
Under the heading “Typographic Art” appeared four pictorial images that were satirically explained as a way to lay out the editor’s feelings of joy, melancholy, indifference and astonishment concerning daily events.
In a bit of 19th-century humor, the magazine wrote: “For fear of startling the public we will give only a small specimen of artistic achievements within our grasp, by way of a first instalment. The following are from Studies in Passion and Emotion.”
The symbols were a hit with 80,000-strong readers.
Commercially, however, Western Union had long been using coded shorthand in its messages. For example, the number 88 meant “love and kisses.”