Hey guys I found a "Joke" Conversation Thread in which the :-) Was Invented.
Period. Microsoft research provided this thread that led to Scott Fahlman's invention of the smiley. This thread was retrieved from the spice vax oct-82 backup tape by Jeff Baird on September 10, 2002.
Basically they were talking about a joke and they proposed that such smiley will represent a joke/happy, the same one inverted will represent a frown, and so on. This conversation is proven to be where it was invented.
Check it out if you wanna see it completely.
Link:
http://research.microsoft.com/~mbj/Smiley/Joke_Thread.html

This post has been edited by microscopic^earthling: Oct 29 2005, 05:34 PM

Wow. That is very cool. I actually wondered once how technological coloquialisms like that evolved. My biggest one: Where did "lol" come from? It's the most widely overused piece of junk out there, and I would like to castrate the person who created that one. My friends and I use "ml" created by a friend of mine from the San Francisco area, which means "mindlessly laughing" only because it sounds better to us for now. I also wondered who created "lmao" and "rotfl". Of course we can't forget the infamous "pos" meaning, "parent over shoulder". What I want to know is: What was it these two teenagers were talking about their parents shouldn't know that is so bad that it merits a code like that? Many a conversation has been had online that I would have liked to have been a fly on the chatroom wall for.

Laught out Loud (LOL) has been out for many years, and like most things, I don't think anyone can claim sole response, after all, it wasn't just one person that developed the languages we know today, it was a collection of people.

That is very interesting. I always wondered how those things were invented.

Yeah, as have I. "LOL" may have been an evolution, but where did "POS" come from? And how does stuff become so popular so quickly? My friend and I created "ML", meaning "mindlessly laughing", hoping we'd see it replace "LOL" and feel responsible, but I have never seen it circulate to someone we both never talked to before. It's only our friends who liked it and adopted it. Does someone know how to pull off spreading a colloquialism like that?

I'd assume using it alot in alot of public places...

Heh... Maybe I'll start using ML just to humor you and see if anything'll happen...

*Shrugs*
One of my friends tried to make a colloquialism before...
It failed... That was years ago
I can't even remember what it was supposed to be again O_o

i wouldnt care who invented them, i guess evolution, changing little things in alphabets, playing with symbols, and someone smart using it to make a face throughtout them.. never cared about it really! lol

Aargh just wrote that post and accidentally closed the tab. Annoying :-(
I think it has become more difficult to establish new words and colloquialisms (on the internet at least).
I guess you all know that story about the Dublin theater propretier, who made a bet that a new nonsense word could be made up in 48 hours and that the public would give it a meaning. The story originates in the 18th century but probably it is nonsense itself, there is no evidence to support the theory. Actually they say it came from inquisitive. Anyway, even it is nonsense, today it is even harder.
Product advertisers are trying to fill our brains with new names everyday and the colloquialisms.. who hasn't tried to make one up, eh? Well I tried at least, a German equivalent for lol, because it was just as plain stupid.
I think to make up a successful colloquialism it ought to be something that you can say too (you can't pronounce ml in one syllable. I personally hate people who say lol in RL (real life) but well, this is one of the best examples. ), the keys should be near to each other on the keyboard (typing time for lol: No time and well it should be for something you want to say often. As you can see among different groups, different colloquialisms appear (ReadThe****ingManual will not be found in a standard chat conversation, but on a lot of support forums). And it should not mean something else in English (and probably French, Spanish and German). As for new words, how about iPod or Hoover (In Germany 'Tempo' for handkerchiefs).. these have found their way into everyday language so they are used for even more stuff than they actually meant. Examples of good advertising + remarkable product names.

It is also really hard to find a unique name for a product nowadays, if you want to include some of the orginal meaning. For a bad example see my signature and search the word in Google ^^ It was like the first thing that came to my mind (of course, but now I feel ashamed for it, because it is so Schwarzenegger-inspirated). Now I got the logo with the V already and I'll probably stick to it.

Hehe I spend to much time thinking about language issues...

The only reason is that I have cared about all kinds of stuff that actually means nothing to my daily life or our society. I am just interested in everything.

Yeah, I hate it when people say LOL in real life, out loud. I had a friend who always yelled, "LMAO!" whenever she laughed and that pissed me off royally. It was created for the Internet. When something is funny, just laugh like everyone else in the world!