A historical newspaper specialist at the digital archival company Proquest believes he has found an example of a sideways winking smiley face embedded in The New York Times transcript of an 1862 speech given by President Lincoln. Other historians are not so sure, saying the semicolon alongside a closed parenthesis is either a mistake or a misinterpretation of something that is perfectly grammatical for that era.
In 2004, a team at Proquest was given the task of creating a student version of historical newspapers. A team of editors scoured the archives of The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and The Christian Science Monitor to find 5,000 articles to go with the American history curriculum. In the process, they stumbled across an article dated Aug. 7, 1862, with the headline: “NEWS FROM WASHINGTON.; A Great War Meeting Held at the Capitol. Important Speech of President Lincoln.”
In the transcription of President Lincoln’s speech, which added comments about applause and shouts from the audience was this line:
“… there is no precedent for your being here yourselves, (applause and laughter ;) and I offer, in justification of myself and you, that I have found nothing in the Constitution against.”
Bryan Benilous, who works with historical newspapers at Proquest, said the team felt the “;)” after the word “laughter” was an emoticon, more than a century before emoticons became a widespread concept.
Could it be? Was this just a typo, a mistake, or was the reporter, transcriber or typesetter having a bit of sly fun?
One expert on emoticons — Scott E. Fahlman, the Carnegie Mellon computer scientist who is credited with inventing them — tells the Times it’s a typo: “I can’t imagine an editor putting that in and meaning, ‘Ha ha,’ trying to emphasize what Lincoln had said. That goes beyond the bounds of editorial comment in a piece of reporting like this.”
On other hand, back then typos were hard to make. The curator of the American Antiquarian Society tells the paper: “At that time, type was still set piece by piece. So the typesetter would have had to pick up the semicolon and set it in the line then pick up the closed bracket and set it next…. My gut feeling is it wasn’t a typo.”
