I grew up using the emoticon.

Take one look into the digital archives of my adolescence and you’d see a hodgepodge of text-based smiley faces, flirtatious winky faces (too many, at times) and — once emoticons evolved into images called emojis -—a fair share of those little yellow middle fingers.

So when I heard the emoticon was turning 35 years old this week, I had mixed feelings. The emoticon is part of who I am and how I communicate. But what do real emotions feel like? I may never know. :-(

The man who might know? Scott Fahlman. He’s a research professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Language Technologies Institute and Computer Science Department, and on Sept. 19, 1982, he sent the world’s first sideways smiley face. He thought of it as a way to label his posts on an online CMU bulletin board as satirical — because sometimes, what was meant as a sarcastic remark would turn into a lengthy, misinformed argument.

I wanted to find out how Mr. Fahlman feels about his invention 35 years later, and how his feelings about emoticons and emojis differ from mine. So I invited him to an online chat room, the only logical venue for a discussion of this nature.

Julian Routh: Hey, Scott ... :-)

Scott Fahlman: Hi Julian.

Julian: 35 years since you first fired off an emoticon. Congratulations. How does it feel to be somewhat responsible for the downfall of human-to-human interaction?

Scott: :-) Well, I think actual human-to-human writing was wasting away before I suggested :-) and :-(, and in any case I don't think it really has done any damage. People use this medium for quick notes. If you want to write great satirical literature, then you don't want to give away whether you're kidding or not. But few of us write that kind of stuff on a daily basis.

Julian: So, it’s 1982. You look at an online bulletin board and say to yourself, ‘You know, people just aren't understanding satire.' When you hit those three keys – the colon, the hyphen and the parenthesis – did you realize what you had started?

Scott: Actually, this was part of a conversation in which about 10 of us played a part. We were looking for a quick and dirty, but intuitive way, to say "this isn't serious, I'm only kidding.” Various suggestions were made, and I finally came up with :-) (in text form) as a way to make a smiling face people would recognize as such, with only a single-line subject and only the old ASCII character set (upper and lower case English letters, numbers, and some punctuation marks).

And no, I thought it would amuse the 10 or so people following this discussion and would be forgotten in a day or two. I didn't even save a copy. But it "went viral" before that was a thing.

Julian: When you see a smiley face anymore, what's your reaction? Poignant nostalgia? Visceral disgust?

Scott: When I see a smiley emoticon in some new context -- in an ad or in some international treaty -- I think that it's sort of cool that this silly thing has spread so far. When I see an emoji (emojum?) I don't really enjoy those or feel much ownership, but I guess they are the remote descendants of this thing I did. I don't especially enjoy them, but if they make Japanese teenagers (of all ages and nationalities) happy, well, that's fine with me.

Julian: Tell me you've actually seen a smiley face in an international treaty.

Scott: Haven't seen one in an international treaty yet, but expect to within the next 3 1/2 years. :-)

Julian: I wish I could laugh or cry right now but it doesn't seem like you appreciate the use of the emoji much.

Scott: I don't use them myself, but I can recognize the basic ones.

Julian: Apparently there’s a large portion of the population that says they’d rather tell a crush their true feelings with emoticons rather than words. Do millennials owe you for that pickup line?

Scott: If pictures of eggplants work for them, that's fine with me.

Julian: Every time someone sends me the middle finger emoji in reaction to a story I wrote, do you take a commission? Should you?

Scott: I've never made any money from the emoticon. It had to be free, or nobody would have used it. Even if it only cost you one cent, it would be too much hassle to collect that. So this had to be my little gift to the world.

I used to say in talks that I've never made a dime from this, and then someone came up at the end and gave me a dime so I would have to stop saying that. So, OK, I've made a dime. Now I just say that I've never made a million dollars from this, and if someone wants me to stop saying that...

Julian: Ask and you shall receive: 💵💵💵

Scott: Ah, can those be cashed in somewhere? Like Bitcoins?

Julian: Oh, Scott :-) Be honest with me. You rushed to the movie theater when that Emoji movie came out.

Scott: I saw a couple of clips on TV, and that was enough. No, I haven't seen it, and with luck, I never will. But the press keeps expecting that I have.

Julian: Guilty as charged. Were you invited to the premiere, though?

Scott: No, not even a free ticket to the local theater. I don't know if it's still running. The reviews were pretty horrendous.

Julian: Are you a member of the emoji-only social network, Emojli?

Scott: Didn't know it existed. Despite helping to invent emoticons, I'm really not part of the emoji culture. When I say I don't like them, reporters want to play that up as a big crusade on my part to stamp these things out. I just find them ugly and uninteresting, but that's true of lots of things. Like golf.

Julian: Emojli closed down after a year, anyways. Probably deserved it.

Scott: To elaborate a bit more on emoji-only communication, I think that emoji do not make up a true and complete language. You can send some limited number of nouns, lots of emotion markers, and a few action verbs, but how would you say something like "I just find them ugly and uninteresting"? Note: it doesn't count if you have to say it first in English and then the recipient can sort of figure out how a string of emoji might say that.

Julian: Well, thank you for doing this, Scott. Now that you've talked to me, do you regret hitting those three keys?

Scott: No, it has been a fun ride. Weird interviews, weird reporters, occasional chances to be a rock star for a day, and sometimes invitations to interesting places to talk about this. Or to chat-rooms. :-)

Julian Routh: jrouth@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1952, Twitter @julianrouth.

First Published: September 21, 2017, 11:30 a.m.