Language experts say the smiley face and other emotional icons, known as emoticons, have given people a concise way in e-mail and other electronic messages of expressing sentiments that otherwise ...

Twenty-five years ago, Carnegie Mellon University professor was the first to use three keystrokes — a colon followed by a hyphen as a horizontal "smiley face" in a computer message.

Pirillo solves the problem on his system by simply telling his Office applications to automatically replace ":)" with a unicode smiley face character—specifically this one: ☺.