Among the huge number of holiday dates associated with culture, science, traditions or just social life, today is different. All, well, at least almost everyone, use the services of “birthday”, but to remember it on the day of the holiday … We correct injustice and congratulate on the birthday smiley, which became one of the most positive inventions of mankind!

The idea of ​​transmitting information using characters as old as the world. Clip, hieroglyphs, icons appeared a long time ago, more than five thousand years ago. And they themselves became the basis of that visual culture, which was transformed into signs that we use in electronic communication. Fun characters began to perform in it the same role as in the usual language perform mimicry and gestures – the color of any emotional speech.
More than a century ago, the legendary epoch, closely associated with facial expressions with emotions, began. Guillaume Duchenne and Charles Darwin, who studied muscle contractions and mimic manifestations, presented the results of their work. Approximately at the same time Ambrose Birs, an American writer, joked in one of his essays: he suggested having a smile from the brackets. At the end of the 60s, Nabokov will pick up on this topic, and on September 19, 1982, Carnegie Mellon Professor Scott Fahlman will for the first time propose the use of three characters – colons, dashes and brackets – to refer to the “smiling face” when typing on the computer .
That’s when there was a real blast in the electronic lexicon! How many happy smiles and sincere feelings gave our birthday, how much joy gave instead of superfluous words!
Of course, in the decade of its existence, the character has changed, and now almost no one is using a classic colon and a ghostly. There were also “improved” smiley images: a circle with a smiley face, emoji – the invention of the Japanese engineer Shigeaki Kurita. Garvey Bell, who believed that the smile created by him would cease to be a commercial symbol, would become an international personification of a good mood and a smile, a smiling face smile as a business card of the State Mutual Life Assurance Company of America. It was then that there was yet another no less positive holiday – the World Smile Day, which was celebrated on the first Friday of October in 1999.
Now almost everyone knows that “smile” translates from English means “smile”, but today for every emotion there is already a separate smiley. The idea of ​​designating emotions in the form of pictures, not words, has gained popularity with the massive spread of the Internet. And although the first attempts to use topographical constructions for expressing emotions took place in the distant 1881 edition of the American humor magazine Puck, and the first emoticons appeared in 1953 on the pages of the New York Herald newspaper (“New York Herald” Tribune “), where they were used in advertising of the feature film” Lili “, now it seems to us that they always existed.
During his lifetime, the smile and its various variations have become a real attribute of electronic communication, without which no one can even imagine even a simple message, and his “close relatives” – emoticons and emotions – have greatly expanded the range of emotions, thoughts and feelings that are transmitted. But who now denies that it is more convenient to answer a few short phrases instead of short phrases?
And this year the smiley celebrates 35th anniversary! And you will agree that this simple and amazing invention allows us to lift the mood in one click. Therefore, be generous to the emoticons, send them more often, generously giving the sincerity and warmth of their hearts!

Translated by Aliona Matushevich