Posted on September 19, 2021 at 4:00 PM by Sadye Scott-Hainchek

Credit for the first use of an emoticon (remember those pre-emoji days?) typically goes to Dr. Scott Fahlman, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University.

But great minds often think alike, as evidenced by an interview that author Vladimir Nabokov gave some thirteen years before Fahlman wrote that :-) should be used to mark a joke on September 19, 1982, according to Literary Hub.

A New York Times reporter asked the Lolita author, back in 1969, where he would rank himself among living and recently deceased authors.

Nabokov responded: “I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile — some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket, which I would now like to trace in reply to your question.”

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