‘Hi there! Happy face. Great to see you again. Wink. Oh, you can’t meet me later? Frown.’ Surely only a planet full of absolute cretins would communicate this way with one another? Well then, welcome ...

Twenty-five years ago, Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman says, he was the first to use three keystrokes — a colon followed by a hyphen and a parenthesis — as a horizontal "smiley ...