There’s this meme floating around online that draws a line from ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics—our ancestors’ earliest attempt at picturing ideas and emotions—to today’s colorful emojis blinking across our phones. And it got me thinking about an intermediate chapter in that journey: the humble emoticon.
Back in 1982, at Carnegie Mellon University, computer scientists were trading jokes about (of all things) a physics puzzle. One joking user’s “mercury-in-a-falling-elevator” hoax got taken seriously — and suddenly it became clear: written text lacked tone. To fix that, Scott Fahlman proposed a sideways smile — 🙂 — to mark humor. And for seriousness, :-(. That small, sideways wink of punctuation changed everything.
In that moment, emoticons became a new kind of hieroglyph—not carved in stone, but typed in bytes. Those two plain characters gave people a tool to express mood, friendliness, sarcasm—nuance that would otherwise get lost in flat text.
What fascinates me is how quickly the idea spread. Within months, those smiley/frowny faces traveled across networks, labs, and universities—and eventually evolved into today’s rich emoji language.
So the next time I see someone scroll past hieroglyphics on a meme only to tap a 😀 or 😂, I smile. It’s cool to remember that behind every modern emoji is a little sideways face from 1982—typed on a screen to say, “Hey, I’m just kidding.”
If you want to take a look at the archived version of the conversation that birthed the emoticon
PHOTO CREDIT: A smiling emoticon “:-)” consisting of a colon, dash, and closed parentheses. (by IkamusumeFan via Wikimedia)
