Online Smiley Face

网上网下尽开颜

什么样的笑最令人难忘？蒙娜丽莎式的神秘莫测、意蕴无穷，还是网络笑脸（smiley face） 的纯粹简约与无处不在？古典也好，时尚也好，无不来自灵感的闪现。

All over the country these days, electronic mail messages are concluding with this odd little punctuation sequence :-) or one of its many variants, like :-( .1

These are "smileys," so-called because when you tilt your head to the left they look like little faces with a colon for eyes and a hyphen for a nose.2 Thus when a message ends :-) it means "just kidding." If it ends :-( it means "I'm depressed." If it ends 7:^] it means "I resemble Ronald Reagan."

It was 20 years ago that Scott Fahlman taught the Net how to smile. The Carnegie Mellon computer scientist has devoted his professional life to arti ficial intelligence,3 the practice of teaching computers how to think like humans , but the bearded scientist is perhaps best known for a flash of inspiration that helped to define Internet culture.4

By the early 1980's, the Computer Science community at Carnegie Mellon was making heavy use of online bulletin boards5 or "bboards". A good many of the posts were humorous. The problem was that if someone made a sarcastic remark6, a few readers would fail to get the joke. This problem caused some people to suggest (only half seriously) that maybe it would be a good idea to explicitly mark posts that were not to be taken seriously.7 After all, when using text-based online communication, we lack the body language or tone-of-voice cues that convey this information when we talk in person or on the phone.8

So on Sept. 19, 1982, Fahlman typed :-) in an online message. "I had no idea I was starting something that would soon pollute all the world's communications cha nnels," he later wrote. The "smiley face" has since become a staple9 of online co mmunication, allowing 12-year-old girls and corporate lawyers alike to punctuate their messages with a quick symbol that says, "Hey, I'm only joking."

This convention caught on quickly around Carnegie Mellon,10 and soon spread too ther universities and research labsvia the primitive computer networks of the day. In the two decades since, the smiling icons have taken the e-world by storm.11 Now called emoticons, short for emotive icons,12 Fahlman's original sideways smiley face sparked the creation of thousands of variations.

Yahoo, Microsoft and America Online all incorporate13 emoticons into their insta nt-messaging systems, while telecom firms, jewelry makers and online retailers have filed trademark applications for14 products and slogans that incorporate Fahlm an's smiley face. But Fahlman has never seen a dime from his creation. "If it cost people a nickel 15 to use it, nobody would have used it. This is my little gift to the world, for better or worse," he said.

1. 现在电子邮件通常会以这样一串奇怪的标点组合 :-)结尾，或其许多变体中的一种，比如 :-(。

2. 这些就是“笑容符”，之所以叫“笑容符”是因为当你把头歪向左边时就会发现，它们看起来就像一张张小脸，冒号代表眼睛，短线代表鼻子。

3. Carnegie Mellon：卡内基梅隆大学，简称CMU，创建于1900年，位于宾夕法尼亚州匹兹堡市，该校的计算机、人工智能领域排行全美大学榜首。 artificial intelligence： [计]人工智能。

4. 不过这位大胡子科学家最为世人所知的是他在定义互联网文化时所表现出的灵感。

5. bulletin boards：布告板（牌），这里指互联网上的电子公告栏（即论坛）。

6. 讽刺的话（评论）。

7. 一些人（半认真地）建议说，没准儿明确标出不必当真的（玩笑）贴子不失为一个好办法 。

8. 毕竟我们在进行基于文字的网络交流时，不像面对面交谈或打电话那样可以借助身体语言或声调变化来传达信息。

9. staple：基本内容，经常性内容。

10. 这个形式很快在CMU校园内流行起来。catch on：流行起来，受（人）欢迎。

11. 在之后的二十年里，笑脸图标席卷了电子界。

12. emoticon：[计]情感符，由字符组成的表情符号，由emotive icons 缩合而成。

13. incorporate：包含，吸收。

14.提出商标申请。

15. nickel：镍币, (美国和加拿大的)五分镍币。