Published on March 28, 2026
Back in my day, there wasn’t an endless collection of readily available emojis to express any emotion you wanted. No, we had to work hard and make our own emojis all . There was no premade smiley face. There was only (colon+right parenthesis) or, if you were feeling festive and wanted to add a nose, (colon+hyphen+right parenthesis).
🙂 and (:-) were but a few of our limited options.
This generation has a Rolodex of winky faces and laughing faces, mad faces, and eye-roll faces. They have sad faces and silly faces, and faces that do both. Thinking of their entitlement makes me feel >:( and =\ and :‑###. (That last one’s a sick face, you illiterate youngins.)
They will never know the pain we endured on AOL Instant Messenger with our meager tool set that couldn’t encompass all the varying emotions we yearned to express. Today’s youth don’t know what it’s like to stare at the keyboard for hours, picturing which combination of symbols would make a flirty face that’s not too flirty. You would be mortified beyond belief if you accidentally sent the following: (8+equal sign+equal sign+equal sign+capital D) (which is being generous, really) when what you meant to send was 8=P, which is clearly a tongue sticking out.
If you weren’t careful, your messages could be misinterpreted. Then the chat could be printed out (on paper!) and posted (with tape!) on your high school classmates’ lockers. And then, your social life would be x_x (that means DEAD).
Yes, there was a sophisticated language that used 8’s and D’s in clever ways to detail all the shapes and sizes—and actions too—of the male form. And a pair of breasts could similarly be interpreted by a variety of circles encased by a set of parentheses. No, it wasn’t crude—it was innovative! Same goes for typing 58008 into our calculators, turning them upside down to display the most profound message: BOOBS.
And the cleverest of us typed 5318008, which proudly declared the word: BOOBIES.
Everyone was creative back then. We were all artists who painstakingly painted each individual low-res pixel in MS Paint, crafted clever arguments with the SmarterChild AIM bot, and customized our Neopets and Club Penguin avatars with panache and flair. In the one hour we were permitted to interrupt phone access to use the dial-up family computer after school, we thrived, we flourished! We poured our souls onto the chat messenger a bunch of random keys, tilting our head to the side, and seeing if the symbols actually looked like something else.
You kids will never know neck pain like we did.
We were a collective society of innovative internet users back then. When we typed (O+colon+right parenthesis), we said as one, “Yes, O:) is an angel. It’s obvious that the ‘O’ is a halo.” Together, we typed (^^^) and shouted in unison, “Why, yes, of course it looks like a shark.” Never before has the entire world been more unified when seeing :|] and screaming in harmony, “It. Is. A. ROBOT!!!”
A forward slash followed “o” like this \o might appear like a random combination that a mere neanderthal could type. But to those who can decipher this millennial hieroglyphic, it kinda looked like a guy waving with his left hand. And if you typed a backslash instead, like this o/, it looked like he was waving with his right hand.
No, that’s not an excited little guy waving both hands. It’s me. I’m slapping my forehead in disbelief that you kids can’t even use context to interpret punctuation-based emotions.
Sure, your little iOS update lets you type every creature in the animal kingdom with one tap. But you’ll never have what we had: a cat (=^・^=), an evil cat (>:3), and this combination that kinda looked like a crab waving its pincers in the air (V.v.V).
In those days, we agonized over the best Avril Lavigne lyrics to quote in our away messages, while awaiting the glorious sound of a door creak that signaled a friend had logged into AIM. We’d pore over the messages sent to us, decoding each emoticon sent like a cryptologist uncovering an ancient code. You might be XD at me right now, but it’s true. It was as clear to us as was LMFAO, ROTFL, and the ever-popular ROFLcopter (that’s a helicopter made of LOLs, you neophytes).
No, you’ll never work as hard as we did to express our emotions with the limited characters we were given. You’ll never know the sacrifices we made to craft the perfect wordless message. And you’ll never know the heartbreak that occurred when a sibling made a phone call and tragically severed our dial-up connection. Related News
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