The smiley has gone through many incarnations over the years, but it consistently retains the same features. ("Kolobok" type)
The smiley, smiley face, or happy face, is a stylized representation of a smiling human face, commonly represented as a yellow button with two dots representing eyes and a half circle representing the mouth. “Smiley” is also sometimes used as a generic term for any emoticon.
Contents
Origin
The very earliest known examples of the graphic are attributed to Harvey Ball, a commercial artist in Worcester, Massachusetts. He devised the face in 1963 for an insurance firm that wanted an internal campaign to improve employee morale.[1][2] Ball never attempted to use, promote or trademark the image; it fell into the public domain in the United States before that could be accomplished.[3] As a result, Ball never made any profit for the iconic image beyond his initial $45 fee.
David Stern of David Stern Inc., a Seattle-based advertising agency also claimed to have invented the smiley. Stern reportedly developed his version in 1967 as part of an ad campaign for Washington Mutual, but says he did not think to trademark it.[4]
Popularization
The graphic was popularized in the early 1970s by Bernard Spain, who seized upon it in a campaign to sell novelty items. The two produced buttons as well as coffee mugs, t-shirts, bumper stickers and many other items emblazoned with the symbol and the phrase "Have a happy day" (devised by Gyula Bogar). It can show many different emotions.
The smiley is largely associated in the UK with the acid house dance music culture that emerged during the second summer of love in the late 1980s, often used as engraved logos on ecstasy tablets at the time.[5] The association was cemented when the band Bomb The Bass used an extracted, blood-splattered smiley from the comic novel Watchmen by Alan Moore, on the centre of their Beat Dis hit single.
Licensing and legal issues
Smiley has been a registered trademark since 1971 when French businessman Franklin Loufrani created "Smiley World" to sell and license the smiley face image in the United Kingdom and Europe. The Smiley name and logo is registered and used in over 100 countries for 25 classes of goods and services.
In 2006 Wal-Mart, which prominently featured a smiley in its "Rolling Back Prices" campaign, sought to trademark the smiley face in the United States, coming into legal conflict with Loufrani and SmileyWorld over the matter.[6][7] In 2006 Wal-mart began to phase out the smiley face on its vests[8] and its website as part of a "no smiling" campaign. [9] During a trademark infringement case against an online parodist, Wal-Mart again tried to claim it held the trademark rights to the yellow smiley face. The judge disagreed and in March 2008 Wal-Mart lost the case with the judge saying that Wal-Mart had no rights to the smiley face.[10]
In 1999, Ball formed World Smile Corporation and began licensing the smiley face to fund his charitable causes. Profits are distributed to charities through the Harvey Ball World Smile Foundation, which also sponsors the annual World Smile Day Ball started in 1999 to encourage "acts of kindness".[11]
More than 1,200 smiley emoticons are registered with the Washington Library of Congress and protected by the Universal Copyright Convention.[citation needed]
The smiley has become an essential of Internet culture, with animated GIF and other image representations, as well as the ubiquitous text-based emoticon, " :-) ". The smiley has been used for the printable version of characters 1 and 2 (one "black", the other "white") on the default font on the IBM PC and successor compatible machines. In modern times, all versions of Microsoft Windows since Windows 95[12] were able to display the smiley since it is part of the Windows Glyph List (though not all fonts include the character and not all programs were Unicode-compliant).[13]
The following Unicode character points are smileys:
☹
0x2639
White Frowning Face
☺
0x263a
White Smiling Face
☻
0x263b
Black Smiling Face
The Wingdings font also includes a smiley: Smileys and emoticons are often used on Internet forums.
The satrirical U.S. magazine Puck presented these typographical emoticons on March 30, 1881.
Main article: Emoticon
Many typographical representations of smiley faces have been developed over the years. Some feature non-smiling expressions or other elaborations. They come in two main varieties, those meant to be viewed sideways, and those meant to be seen upright.
Icon
Meaning
:-)
classic smile with nose
:-(
classic sad with nose
:)
classic smile without nose
:(
classic sad without nose
The two original text smileys, :-) to indicate a joke and :-( to mark things that are not a joke were invented on September 19, 1982 by Scott E. Fahlman, a research professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Department of Computer Science. His original post at the CMU CS general board, where he suggested the use of the smileys, was retrieved on September 10, 2002 by Jeff Baird from an October 1982 backup tape of the spice vax (cmu-750x) as proof to support the claim.
More recently, small, in-line graphical images of smileys and other faces have become popular, especially on forums:
The reverse, or left-handed, smileys (-: have also gained popularity for being a way to avoid having text smileys converted to graphical representations in certain settings such as instant messaging programs.
In May 2002, Luke Helder, a midwestern pipe-bomber, tried to replicate a smiley face in his pattern of pipe bombs. His first 16 bombs formed circles, the first in Nebraska and the second on the border between Illinois and Iowa. Those bombs completed the eyes. Two other bombs in Texas and Colorado were apparently the beginnings of the smile. However, he was captured before being able to complete it.
A certain species of Hawaiian spider, Theridion grallator, a.k.a. the Happyface Spider, has some morphs which display an uncanny smiley-face pattern on its yellow body.
The smallest incarnation of the smiley was created by Paul Rothemund of the California Institute of Technology. He used strands of DNA in a method he calls DNA origami to construct a complex two-dimensional nanostructure in the shape of a smiley face.
The 230km (143 mile) wide Martian crater Galle (on the Argyre Planitia) very strongly resembles a smiley face.
A smiley face can be seen within a properly placed dental implant in a dental radiograph.[citation needed]
In the computer game, Unreal Tournament, there is a smiley face on the front of the flak cannon's arcing contact grenade (secondary fire). This is obviously very hard to sight because of the grenade's high velocity, but a time pausing cheat can be used to stop the grenade in mid-air enabling the player to observe the smiley face on its front.
In the city of Plymouth (UK) there are numerous "feel-good messages" written around the city centre. The origin of these and the culprit are not known but everyone of them is tagged with a smiley face or a =)as it would appear.
A possible gang of serial killers is dubbed the "Smiley Face Gang" due to a trademark smiley face found near murder scenes along the Mississippi River boardering Wisconsin and Minnesota.[15]
A smiley face adorns the north side of the water tower in Hammond, Illinois.
A smiley can also be used to refer to an upper lip frenulum piercing. This is essentially the piercing of the webbing in one's mouth between the center of the upper lip and the center of the upper gums. The piercing gets its name because it is only visible when the individual with the piercing smiles.
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