[sf-lug] (-:, etc.

[Michael Paoli]

In my recollection, my first aquaintence with (-:, and the like, was
for left-handed variations of smileys and the like - generally to
indicate a lefthanded person or something lefthanded.

>From (http or
ftp)://etlport.etl.go.jp/pub/hp-archive/Jul23.92/smiley/smiley_4.0.tar.Z
which I got
around 1992-10-21T23:59:00-0700
we have within that:
$ ls -on --full-time smiley_4.0/faces.in
-rw-------  1 1003 23975 1991-10-29 01:32:50.000000000 -0800 smiley_4.0/faces.in
$ grep '^(-[:;] ' smiley_4.0/faces.in
(-:     Australian
(-:     Don Ellis from Tektronix
(-:     left-handed
$ 

references/excerpts:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/smileys/

Quoting Asheesh Laroia <asheesh at asheesh.org>:

> On Thu, 4 Oct 2007, Kristian Erik Hermansen wrote:
> 
> > On 10/4/07, Asheesh Laroia <asheesh at asheesh.org> wrote:
> >> wrong. (-;
> >
> > First time in my Internet experience I have ever seen a reverse smiley
> > face!  Not even the CompuServe days had reverse smileys!!!
> 
> This is such a FAQ that I've finally answered it somewhere public and made 
> that answer available over the hypertext protocol: 
> http://www.asheesh.org/note/reverse%20smileys.html .