World Smile Day
Oct 1
Other Scottish Country Dances for this Day
Today's Musings, History & Folklore
"Have a Nice Day!" 🙂🙂🙂
We all certainly could use something to smile about! The smiley face as we know it today was created by Harvey Ross Ball, an American graphic artist in 1963. Harvey Ball was employed by State Mutual Life Assurance Company of Worcester, Massachusetts (now Hanover Insurance) to create a happy face to raise the morale of the employees. Ball created the design in ten minutes and was paid $45. His rendition, with bright yellow background, dark oval eyes, full smile and creases at the sides of the mouth, was imprinted on more than fifty million buttons and reached its height of popularity in 1972! The smiley face's descendant, the modern emoticon or emoji has origins back to 1881 when facial expressions made out of punctuation as typographical art made their first appearance in a magazine! By 1982, text emoticons were incorporated into computer communications and graphic emojis as we know them became mainstream after the turn of the millennium. Have a Nice Day! 🙂
All the Lads They Smile at Me
Today is World Smile Day, a celebration of happiness hosted by the Harvey Ball World Smile Foundation in honor of the man who created the smiley face.
Graphic artist Harvey Ross Ball was commissioned to create the smiley face for State Mutual Life Assurance Company of Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1963 to help raise the morale of the employees. He created the design in ten minutes and was paid $45. In the early 1970s, this rendition began being duplicated with the slogan "Have a Happy Day" which mutated into the "Have A Nice Day" and the design was eventually trademarked by in 1972 by Franklin Loufrani from France. When challenged about his legal right to trademark this symbol, Loufrani's sonargued that the design is so simple that no one person can lay claim to having created it. As evidence for this, Loufrani's website points to early cave paintings found in France (2500 BC) that he claims are the first depictions of a smiley face. Editor's note: this is a good place to insert a smiley emoticon, your choice.
On the Internet, the smiley became one of the first "emojis," a visual means of conveyance using images. On September 19, 1982, Scott Fahlman from Carnegie Mellon University first proposed using the emoticon smile emoticon to differentiate jokes from serious posts in online message boards. Fahlman stated:
“I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers: :-) . Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use: :-(”.
Now automatically converted into images, these character sequences, or "smileys," as they came to be known, were effectively the first online irony marks. Smileys now come in all shapes and flavours.
For a discussion of the smile (or smirk) in portraiture, click the most well-known smile in art history, Leonardo da Vinci’s La Gioconda (Mona Lisa), 1503–1506.
And for all Smiley Faces vintage and emori, "Have a nice day!"
Click the dance cribs or description below to link to a printable version of the dance!
