Smileys

A smiley is a unique representation of a happy human face. The word is also used as a general term for any emoticon. It used to refer to a button that was yellow in color and had two black dots and an upturned half circle that stand for the eyes and the mouth, respectively. The earliest smileys are credited to Harvey Ball. He came up with the graphic for an insurance firm in 1963. He wasn’t able to put a trademark on it because it already became a property of the US public domain. However, Frank Loufrani is now disputing this fact. He says he created the image for a 1971 promotional piece for a newspaper. He had it trademarked in more than 100 nations and for every kind of service and product. Yet another man, David Stern, who worked for an advertising company in Seattle, is also claiming to have created the smiley.

Despite all of these claims to the origin of the smiley, it was brothers Spain who popularized the graphic by selling all kinds of novelty items in the 1970s. Murray and Bernard came out with smileys on buttons, mugs, bumper stickers, t-shirts and other items. The image was even engraved on ecstasy tablets in the late 1980s. Wal-Mart’s current logo is the smiley face.

The smiley is now most prevalent on the Internet. It is indispensable in the culture along with animated GIF image representations and emoticons. They are widely used on forums and dispersed on the Internet to distinguish between a joke and an angry statement. Instant messaging programs have their own smileys with text being converted into graphics and animated icons.

The smiley has become an integral part of our culture. It has been featured in movies and television shows, books and literature, art and novelty items, music and software. It is a universal symbol of the Internet culture that has evolved to include most facets of life.