For all their slick sheen of modernity as a byproduct of the computer age, the roots of the emoticon can be traced as far back as the days of dank medieval castles. New Zealand scholar Sydney Shep, who set out to track the emoticon’s prehistory, found reports of similar “pictorial reading cues” in medieval times, and stumbled on her first emoticons in a 19th-century typographic journal at St. Bride’s Printing Library in London.
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