236 5е* SHADY CHARACTERS

Sandwiched between a story satirizing the American judicial system,
and one of the cartoons against which the “letterpress department”
had directed its tirade, the article and its accompanying image have
the feel of filler material. Puck’s right-way-up emoticons were clearly
not expected to rock the typographic boat.

The meandering path toward the modern emoticon continued in
1887, when the celebrated (and feared) critic Ambrose Bierce penned
a tongue-in-cheek essay on writing reform entitled “For Brevity and
Clarity.”85 Alongside helpful contractions of phrases such as “join in
the holy bonds of wedlock” (jedlock) and “much esteemed by all who
knew him” (mestewed), Bierce presented a new mark of punctuation
intended to help less fortunate writers convey humor or irony:

While reforming language I crave leave to introduce an
improvement in punctuation—the snigger point, or note
of cachinnation. It is written thus w and represents, as
nearly as may be, a smiling mouth. It is to be appended,
with the full stop, to every jocular or ironical sentence; or,
without the stop, to every jocular or ironical clause of a
sentence otherwise serious—thus: “Mr. Edward Bok is the
noblest work of God —\”8i

Bierce’s proposal of a “snigger point” or “note of cachinnation” (now
almost extinct, “cachinnation” means “loud or immoderate laugh¬
ter”) was itself an ironic act rather, his mark a mere prop with which
to poke fun at unduly serious writers.87 Unsurprisingly, the did not
catch on.*

The last pre-Internet emoticons ambled casually into view at

* Somewhat improbably, Unicode defines a “smile” character, or w, that appears suspiciously
similar to Ambrose Bierce’s “note of cachinnation.”

IRONY AND SARCASM ^ 237

the end of the 1960s. First, in 1967, a Baltimore Sunday Sun colum¬
nist named Ralph Reppert was quoted in the May edition oí Reader’s
Digest. Reppert, writing that his “Aunt Ev is the only person I know
who can write a facial expression,” explained that:

Aunt Ev’s expression is a symbol that looks like this: —)

It represents her tongue stuck in her cheek. Here’s the
way she used it in her last letter: “Your Cousin Vernie is
a natural blonde again —) {.}”88

Like Bierce’s snigger point, Aunt Ev’s typographical creation was
clearly not a serious proposition, and its appearance was apparently
a one-off.

Two years later, and on a literary plane far removed from the Read¬
er’s Digest, the last known analog smiley sprung from the high mind of
the author Vladimir Nabokov. A famously controlling interviewee,
Nabokov insisted on being provided with questions in advance so that
he might formulate cogent replies.89 Recounting a question asked by
Alden Whitman of the New York Times as to where Nabokov ranked
himself among writers of his era, the Russian émigré replied obliquely:
“I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a
smile—some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket, which I
would now like to trace in reply to your question.”90

Nabokov had wittily, if unwittingly, re-created Ambrose Bierce’s
grinning note of cachinnation. Though it is often mentioned in the
same breath as Fahlman’s later emoticons, Nabokov’s “supine round
bracket” was simply an unrelated typographic joke, and as with the
others that had gone before it, its life ended on the same page on which
it had begun.91