The word snoop - Ursula Dubosarsky 2009

Smileys
Back to the future

I’m sad to say we’re almost at the end of this book. But I’m glad to say we’re finishing with something happy—smileys. (See, you’re smiling already!)

A smiley is a symbol you create by using the punctuation marks on the keyboard to make messages without words. The most common is the happy face (“smiley,” get it?) made up of a colon and a bracket. It looks like eyes and a smiling mouth if you turn your head sideways (don’t hurt your neck . . .).

Some people like to put in a hyphen for the nose.

Okay, turn your head back the right way now.

The smiley started off in e-mails, to show that something was a joke (or at least not meant to be taken too seriously). Some people find that it’s hard to express emotions in written words alone, and so a smiley can take the place of tone of voice or the look on a face. If you got a message like this, for example:

PLZ COME NOW

you might think the person was saying crossly, ’“Get here at once!” whereas what they really wanted to say was:

In other words, “Pretty please, I really really want you to come over now, pleeeeeease.”

The happy face was just the beginning—very quickly dozens of other symbols started appearing, like:

They’re all generally called smileys (or sometimes emoticons), even if they’re not smiling. Look on the Internet—you’ll find hundreds of them, as many as there are human feelings. There are different ones for different languages, and new ones being made up all the time. You’ve probably made up a few yourselves!

Half the fun is making them up, and the other half is trying to interpret them, to understand what they mean. Here, have a quick smiley test—what do you think these could mean?

Well, now that we’ve come to the end of the book, I suppose it could mean that I’m surprised, or want to kiss you, or that I’m very very angry, but really I’m just:

crying because the time has come to say . . .

Adieu! from the Word Snoop . . .

This is our very last code, Word Snoops. (Sob!) I had better make it a hard one. (Hint: I think you’re going to need your mobile phone.)

2.3 6.3 6.2 4.1 7.3 2.1

8.1 8.2 5.3 2.1 8.1 4.3

6.3 6.2 7.4!