Posted on Friday 24 October 2003

The ability to offend vast numbers of your friends and acquaintances has been greatly enhanced with the invention of email. I suppose the potential always existed with other forms of written correspondence but there's something about the immediacy of email which makes it seem more like a verbal form of communication rather than a textual one. That is, a verbal medium but one that is devoid of voice tone, facial expression or body gestures. When used carelessly it can far too easily lead to misunderstanding.

Hence we have the smiley

or, somewhat more pretensiously, the emoticon

to help us smooth out these thorns as much as possible. But the perils inherent in rapidly and remotely exchanging texts are hardly new. More than a century ago, telegraph operators had already discovered this problem when they started yammering away at each other using Morse code. The remoteness of communication through the wire meant that it was far too easy for a harmless joke to be taken the wrong way. The solution was to append a HI

i.e.  . . . .   . .



to the end of every humorous sentence. It was, in effect, a smiley.

Until recently, I had been under the impression that "HI" was some sort of an acronym, "humour intended" or something like that. Not so apparently, HI was really the product of a different kind of miscommunication:

Alfred Vail, Morse’s assistant, was the inventor of the telegraph hand-key and sounder. He also made changes where characters were defined by spaces and dashes, as well as dits. ‘HO HO’ or ‘HEE HEE’, were used for laughter or humor. These are incorrectly sent today as ‘HI HI’. The error results from the confusion in the early days of amateur radio, between the use of the Continental or International Morse code, and the Landline/Railway or American Morse code. In the American Morse code, ‘O’ is sent as two dits, spaced slightly farther apart than the two dits in the letter ‘I’ Radio amateurs, not familiar with the American Morse code,, picked it up as ‘HI HI’, instead of ‘HEE HEE’ or ‘HO HO’.

[A HISTORY OF SOME CW ABBREVIATIONS]

See this Morse code table for more information.

I was interested to learn (via LanguageHat) that the Japanese have developed a totally different set of smileys and emoticons from the ones we use in the West.

1.Chapter of "Expressions of feelings"
 
(These are the most popular ones. Everybody knows them)

	(*^_^*)		(>_<)
Smiling (niko niko)	smile (nikott)	Wow! (wa--i!)	ouch! (itai!)
It's very popular.	Blushes when smiling.	Raising hands and saying "Wow"	Indicating pain or failure
	p(^^)q		(-_-)zzz
Gyaaa--!	Wishing good luck (ganbare!)	crying face (naki gao)	Sleeping (neteru)
Being surprised with eyes wide open.	Holding a banner and cheering	Crying with tears running down the cheeks.	Good night.
	(^_^)V		(p_-)
? (hate?)	Victory! (pi--su!)	Expressing defeat (maitta)	Magnifying glass (mushi megane)
Saying "I don't understand" or asking "Do you understand?"	Making the victory sign,	Holding out the white flag of peace with a smile.	Trying uncover some secret
(^^)//		(^-^)b	(-_-)
Applausing (hakushu)	Tears of happiness (naki warai)	Isn't it? (ne!)	Getting angry without showing it outside (mutt..)
We use it when we want to appreciate so much something	sometime you may have the moment that you are too happy till tear come	Asking "Do you agree?" or "Isn't it?"	He gets angry but he doesn't express his emotion so much outside.

[more]

Some of these emoticons use characters that are not available on a Western keyboard. So for your signalling convenience, here is a list of ones that only use ASCII characters.