Electronic Communications Week finds us looking at some of the lingo of netiquette. Netiquette, of course, is the term that blends net (shortened from internet) and etiquette and names "etiquette governing communication on the Internet." (来源：www.EnglishCN.com)

One popular tool of communication is the emoticon. Like netiquette, emoticon is a blend word; it is formed from emotion plus icon. An emoticon is a group of keyboard characters that typically represents a facial expression or suggests an attitude or emotion and that is used especially in computerized communication, such as e-mail.

Although the inventor of the emoticon is not definitively known, computer scientist Scott Fahlman is commonly credited with the honor. Back in 1982, that researcher proposed to his online colleagues that they type a semi-colon, dash, and a parenthesis close to indicate a positive tone and a semi-colon, dash, and parenthesis open to indicate a negative one.

Needless to say, the idea caught on. More than 20 years later, while electronic communicators busily click on visual representations to replace nonverbal clues, academics have taken to studying emoticons in electronic communication.

That's right; the creation intended to bring clarity to communication has itself opened up a new area of discourse.