What a thing to be proud about. Today, if you believe Scott E. Fahlman (a professor at Carnegie Mellon University), marks the 25th anniversary of the emoticon. This news is supposed to make me :-) (happy). But it doesn’t. It makes me }: [(angry).

Although some dispute that it was his innovation alone, Fahlman is thought to have used the first emoticon at 11.44am on an electronic bulletin board on this date in 1982. “I propose the following character sequence for joke markers: :-),” he typed. “Read it sideways.” A quarter of a century on, Yahoo is now sponsoring the Smiley Award, a student competition for “innovation in technology-assisted, person-to-person communication”. The emoticon, they feel, is something to be celebrated.

I am of a different view. In fact, I am of the view that, if Fahlman is indeed the inventor of the emoticon, then he deserves to be dropped into a harbour wearing concrete overshoes, alongside, perhaps, the inventor of bestiality and the inventor of the Crazy Frog. “Joke markers” indeed. If your jokes need markers, you shouldn’t be allowed to make them. Fahlman and his ilk appear to forget that people have been writing since before the days of the internet. We already have tools for conveying humour, and plenty of other emotions. They are called “words”.

Emoticons are vile and for idiots. Which means, I suppose, they are actually quite useful in that they allow the rest of us to digitally identify the kind of barely literate slack-jawed, emotional retards who, on paper, would put a smiley face in circle every time they dotted an “i”. I hate them. And no, I haven’t forgotten the “joke marker”. I mean it.

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