How olde art thou, Smiley Face emoticon?
Love them or hate them, emoticons are an unavoidable convention of our times. But they may not be so new: Levi Stahl thinks he's found a smiley-face emoticon in a 350-year-old poem....
Love them or hate them, emoticons are an unavoidable convention of our times. But they may not be so new: Levi Stahl thinks he's found a smiley-face emoticon in a 350-year-old poem.
Mr. Stahl is a publicity manager with the University of Chicago Press. He believes that the familiar punctuation used at the end of the second line of the Robert Herrick poem, 'To Fortune', is, in fact, a smiley face emoticon.
The poem is from Herrick's collection, Hesperides, published in 1648. Mr. Stahl confirmed the punctuation with the Oxford University Press and Harvard's Houghton Library, pointing to consistency across editions and indicating that its use was purposeful.
Hear Levi Stahl argue the case for aging the emoticon by more than 300 years.