The first frown was not sad

At 11:44 a.m. on September 19, 1982, Scott Fahlman posted a short proposal to a Carnegie Mellon computer-science bulletin board:

I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:

:-)

Read it sideways.

The missing word in the first sentence survived into history. So did the face.

The immediate problem was not general emotional poverty in electronic communication. It was a fake warning about mercury contamination and fire damage in an elevator. Some readers had taken it seriously. The ensuing discussion considered marking jokes with an asterisk, a percent sign or various more elaborate codes.

Fahlman’s pictogram won. But his original post proposed a second symbol whose intended meaning is now less familiar:

Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use

:-(

The frown was not initially a report of sadness. It was a seriousness marker. The pair classified messages: joke and not joke.

That distinction began slipping almost immediately. In a November 1982 message explaining the new convention beyond Carnegie Mellon, James Morris offered two examples. “Have you stopped beating your wife? :-)” was a joke. “I need to talk to you :-(” meant “be prepared for trouble.” Seriousness had already acquired bad news.

The drift was built into the notation. A star could have remained metadata, like a label saying satire. The sideways characters plainly depicted faces. That made them memorable, but it also invited readers to interpret them as expressions. Most sincere statements are not unhappy, and nobody needed to append a frown to a factual lunch announcement merely to certify that lunch existed.

Fahlman’s joke marker became a smile because its two meanings aligned: jokes and smiling often belong together. Its opposite was less stable. “Not a joke” described the status of a message. A frowning mouth described the person sending it.

We kept the face and discarded the filing system.