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comments to be badly misinterpreted (not always even by newbies), resulting in arguments and flame wars. |
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Hundreds of emoticons have been proposed, but only a few are in common use. These include: |
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'smiley face' (for humor, laughter, friendliness, occasionally sarcasm) |
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'frowney face' (for sadness, anger, or upset) |
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'half-smiley' (ha ha only serious); also known as semi-smiley or winkey face. |
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(These may become more comprehensible if you tilt your head sideways, to the left.) |
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The first two listed are by far the most frequently encountered. Hyphenless forms of them are common on CompuServe, GEnie, and BIX; see also bixie. On Usenet, smiley is often used as a generic term synonymous with emoticon, as well as specifically for the happy-face emoticon. |
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It appears that the emoticon was invented by one Scott Fahlman on the CMU bboard systems around 1980. He later wrote: "I wish I had saved the original post, or at least recorded the date for posterity, but I had no idea that I was starting something that would soon pollute all the world's communication channels." [GLS confirms that he remembers this original posting]. |
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Note for the newbie: Overuse of the smiley is a mark of loserhood! More than one per paragraph is a fairly sure sign that you've gone over the line. |
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empire n. Any of a family of military simulations derived from a game written by Peter Langston many years ago. Five or six multi-player variants of varying degrees of sophistication exist, and one single-player version implemented for both Unix and VMS; the latter is even available as MS-DOS freeware. All are notoriously addictive. |
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engine n. 1. A piece of hardware that encapsulates some function but can't be used without some kind of front end. Today we have, especially, print engine: the guts of a laser printer. 2. An analogous piece of software; notionally, one that does a lot of noisy crunching, such as a database engine. |
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The hackish senses of engine are actually close to its original, pre-Industrial-Revolution sense of a skill, clever device, or instrument (the word is cognate to 'ingenuity'). This sense had not been completely eclipsed by |
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