Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

by Gretchen McCulloch

Filling an important niche, the text-based emoticons grew and changed. The meaning of the basic smile shifted after Scott Fahlman’s original proposal, from indicating a joke to indicating a more general positive sentiment, a marker of sincerity: “that’s great :)” is sincere, not sarcastic. The nose fell out of favor among younger people: in 2011, a study of emoticons on Twitter by linguist Tyler Schnoebelen found that noseful emoticons were used by people who also tended to tweet to celebrities like Pepe Aguilar, Ashton Kutcher, and Jennifer Lopez, whereas those who tweeted noseless emoticons tended to prefer to tweet to Justin Bieber, Miley Cyrus, the Jonas Brothers, and Selena Gomez. (For the benefit of readers from the future who don’t have a degree in Early Twenty-First Century American Pop Culture, I’ll point out that Justin Bieber and the like were very popular among teenagers in 2011, while Kutcher, Lopez, et al. were an older set of celebrities. This strongly suggests that younger people were dropping the noses in their emoticons.)