September 19 - The Day of Smiley Emoticons :-) and :-(

Scott Fahlman is a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University. Fahlman is credited with originating the first smiley emoticon (it's a portmanteau word of the English words emotion and icon), which he thought would help people on a message board at Carnegie Mellon to distinguish serious posts from jokes. He proposed the use of :-) and :-( for this purpose, and the symbols caught on. The original message from which these symbols originated was posted on September 19, 1982:

19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman :-)
From: Scott E Fahlman

I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:
:-)
Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use
:-(

Within a few months, it had spread all over. Nowdays there are many variations on the theme and style of emoticons, for example, Korean style, ideographic style, Japanese style (without tilting one's head to the left: 0_o or *_*).

So smiley emoticons turn into a sort of artificial language.