The smiley - Lexicon
Dot, dot, comma, dash, and there you have the moon face; a poem from the last century, which today can at best serve as an example of "cringe", because nowadays dots and dashes are no longer used to make moon faces, but smileys, simple pictograms that express joy, sadness, anger or surprise. And although these symbols are very often intended to express certain feelings, the word emoji, which includes smileys, has nothing to do with "emotion"; it is a Japanese word that simply means "picture character" (which is a little bizarre, as the Japanese script itself also consists of picture characters).
The word emoticon, which is actually derived from "emotion" (and "icon" for "image") and is by definition also a simple symbol constructed from punctuation marks that is intended to express an emotional state, is different.
Emoticon and emoji are not as young as you might think; the original form of the happy and sad smiley was standardized as early as 1962 by US computer science professor Scott Fahlman, but the original form of faces made of punctuation marks goes back to the century before last. As early as the 19th century, typesetters in print shops put together movable lead type and characters in such a way that they could be interpreted as human faces with different facial expressions; these little pictures were called "typeset jokes".
The fact that we already perceive two dots and two lines as a face is due to a phenomenon called "pareidolia", according to which we believe we perceive familiar shapes in structures and patterns; as a result, sockets, parking meters or a certain arrangement of windows and doors sometimes appear similar to faces.
Originally intended as a joke or witty game with punctuation marks, emoticons and emojis are now an integral part of written communication: with their emotional meanings, they compensate for the lack of emphasis and facial expressions in correspondence and can thus give the recipient additional information about the emotional state in which the sender has written the text or how they want it to be understood.
And thanks to the constant further development of emojis, they are now even mutating from auxiliary characters in regular texts into a font in their own right; there are now even entire novels that are told using only emojis!
Text: Dirk-Boris Rödel
Graphic: Jonas Bachmann
The smiley - Lexicon
Dot, dot, comma, dash, and there you have the moon face; a poem from the last century, which today can at best serve as an example of "cringe", because nowadays dots and dashes are no longer used to make moon faces, but smileys, simple pictograms that express joy, sadness, anger or surprise. And although these symbols are very often intended to express certain feelings, the word emoji, which includes smileys, has nothing to do with "emotion"; it is a Japanese word that simply means "picture character" (which is a little bizarre, as the Japanese script itself also consists of picture characters).
The word emoticon, which is actually derived from "emotion" (and "icon" for "image") and is by definition also a simple symbol constructed from punctuation marks that is intended to express an emotional state, is different.
Emoticon and emoji are not as young as you might think; the original form of the happy and sad smiley was standardized as early as 1962 by US computer science professor Scott Fahlman, but the original form of faces made of punctuation marks goes back to the century before last. As early as the 19th century, typesetters in print shops put together movable lead type and characters in such a way that they could be interpreted as human faces with different facial expressions; these little pictures were called "typeset jokes".
The fact that we already perceive two dots and two lines as a face is due to a phenomenon called "pareidolia", according to which we believe we perceive familiar shapes in structures and patterns; as a result, sockets, parking meters or a certain arrangement of windows and doors sometimes appear similar to faces.
Originally intended as a joke or witty game with punctuation marks, emoticons and emojis are now an integral part of written communication: with their emotional meanings, they compensate for the lack of emphasis and facial expressions in correspondence and can thus give the recipient additional information about the emotional state in which the sender has written the text or how they want it to be understood.
And thanks to the constant further development of emojis, they are now even mutating from auxiliary characters in regular texts into a font in their own right; there are now even entire novels that are told using only emojis!
Text: Dirk-Boris Rödel
Graphic: Jonas Bachmann
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