Question: what is an emoticon? is it a frill or is it necessary?

Answer: An emoticon, also called a smiley, is a sequence of ordinary printable ASCII characters, such as :-), ;o), ^_^ or :-(, or a small image, intended to represent a human facial expression and convey an emotion. Emoticons are a form of paralanguage commonly used in e-mail messages, in online bulletin boards, online forums, instant messengers, or in chat rooms, without them simple statements could be misinterpreted. Sometime during 1981, Scott Fahlman (now a Principle Research Scientist in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University), devised a scheme for encoding and conveying one's feelings in small text "glyphs" to overcome this frustration.\n\nLook up emoticon in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.The word emoticon is a portmanteau which popular etymology bases on emotion and icon. A similar portmanteau, verticon (based on vertical and (i?)con), is sometimes used when referring to the East Asian style of emoticon.\n\nThe smile is represented with a basic smiley :-). The colon represents the eyes, the hyphen is for the nose, and the parenthesis is for the mouth.\n\nMany variants exist with different symbols substituted for the basic ones. The symbol for the nose is often omitted, for example :) or ;). When the colon is replaced with the equals sign, =), the nose is almost always omitted (so one would not see =-), for example).
This question from the Yahoo Q&A forum is categorized in the topic: Society & Culture