Do emoticons make you or ? Whether you like them or not, you probably see emoticons — a portmanteau of “emotion” and “icon” — on a daily basis and thus, can appreciate the history of these quirky communication symbols. Here’s a little explanation, which we thought appropriate since today marks the 30-year anniversary of their first use.

On September 19, 1982, Scott Fahlman, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, posted the first documented “emoticons” (a happy face and a sad face), formed with a colon, a hyphen and a bracket. Fahlman explained the need for emoticons thusly:

The problem was that if someone made a sarcastic remark, a few readers would fail to g…
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More About: Did You Know, design, emoticons, features, mashable, typography, web

Source: Mashable!