Comments on: What is the origin of the in-profile emoticon?

Question: What is the origin of the in-profile emoticon?

Kattullus — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 05:02:29 -0800

Lately on Facebook I've been seeing a kind of smiley I've never seen before: c",) I'm curious to know where this type of emoticon originates. Have you seen them before? Do they come out of any particular internet culture?

The variants of in-profile emoticons I've seen are:

c°.)

c¨.)

c"_)

I've yet to figure out how to google for them.

By: SillyShepherd

SillyShepherd — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 05:17:17 -0800

Maybe they'll show up on Urban Dictionary one of these days. I don't understand them, either. Unless they're backwards?

By: Kattullus

Kattullus — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 05:21:20 -0800

It's a head in profile. The c is the nose, the " is the eyes, the , is the mouth and the ) is the back of the head: c",)

By: Kattullus

Kattullus — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 05:22:25 -0800

I also didn't pick up on it at first. They might have been around for a while and I just haven't seen them for what they are, but just dismissed them as nonsense.

By: Kattullus

Kattullus — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 05:25:16 -0800

Actually, I see from the Urban Dictionary entry you linked to, SillyShepherd, that they've been around at least since 2008.

By: Nelson

Nelson — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 08:39:48 -0800

Fascinating. This is a third aspect for smileys, different from the US/European sideways :-) style and the face-on Japanese style (^_^).

You're right, you can't easily search for this on Google, Bing, Baidu, or Yandex; all their search parsers pick it up as the letter c. I hunted around variants of [emoticon nose profile] and didn't come up with anything. There's no reference to this style on Wikipedia (yet).

It's worth noting that two of your three examples are not ASCII, but require ISO-Latin-1 to type. That suggests they are newer than the Email / Usenet smileys that date back to the 80s.

By: Kattullus

Kattullus — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 11:20:47 -0800

Yeah, that's a good point about ISO-Latin-1. I'm Icelandic and have Facebook friends in other European countries. Both ° and ¨ are standard on several keyboard layouts. c¨.) was used by an Icelandic friend, but I'm not sure about the other ones. I feel like if the head-in-profile emoticon was an Icelandic-only thing and has been around from 2008, I would've heard about it before.

Also, as a complete sidebar, I just realized that this emoticon style reminds me of Ziggy.

By: artychoke

artychoke — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 12:35:31 -0800

To respond to your complete sidebar, they remind me of thesneeze.com's dad's cake face.

By: Kattullus

Kattullus — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 16:26:49 -0800

This isn't getting me closer to finding an origin, but I was talking to a friend about this who's very involved with gamer culture, and she has never seen the Ziggy style smiley. But she came up with this, a piggy: c"\/)~

By: dhartung

dhartung — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 17:04:56 -0800

Kattullus, fascinating! I agree with Nelson -- this is a third genre of emoticon that hasn't been seen widely before. I wonder if it traces back to a specialized chat or SMS service (the way some emoticons were developed for BBS or CompuServe or AOL environmental constraints).

As for search engines, I happened upon SymbolHound which allegedly offers code-search functionality across the wider web. It failed to turn up any of these examples, though.

By: Kattullus

Kattullus — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 17:29:37 -0800

Ooh! SymbolHound found seven results for c",) and all by the same guy on StackOverflow. That guy is from Norway. There were some more results for c'',) (two apostrophes instead of a quotation mark) though most of these are doubles. The one person on StackOverflow who used that was from South Africa. Symbolhound found nothing for the other ones.

Some of these examples are pretty old, the oldest I found was from 2009. I'm tempted to think that this might be most common in Nordic countries, but I need a few more data points before I'm comfortable saying that.

By: B(oYo)BIES

B(oYo)BIES — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 03:19:41 -0800

Related
Related
Semi-related

- Enjoy!
（^人^）