An Associated Press article notes a milestone birthday for the punctuation that give emotion to our e-mails:

Twenty-five years ago, three keystrokes a colon followed by a hyphen and a parenthesis were first used as a horizontal "smiley face" in a computer message by Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman, the university said.

The article goes on to say:

"Language experts say the smiley face and other so-called emoticons, or emotional icons, have given people a concise way of expressing sentiments in e-mail and other electronic messages that otherwise would be difficult to detect."

An article in Wikipedia has the practice of using symbols as a shortand for words or to convey feelings going back even farther. According to that site, the National Telegraphic Review and Operators Guide in April 1857 documented the use of the number 73 in Morse code to express "love and kisses."

But it certainly has caught on like wildfire in the years since e-mail, online message groups and instant messages have gained popularity.

(Associated Press photo: Twenty-five years ago, Carnegie Mellon professor Scott E. Fahlman used three keystrokes -- a colon followed by a hyphen and a parenthesis -- to create a horizontal "smiley face" in a computer message.)