Comment by hatchoo

5 years ago

I've worked with several Russians and I noticed that they type the smile emoticon without the colon... So instead of :) it's just ). For laughing it's )))))))

What's up with that? )

8 comments

hatchoo

Reply
_RPL5_  5 years ago

My pet theory is that it takes more effort with a Russian keyboards to type the smiley face.

With English, you do "SHIFT + ;" for the colon and then "SHIFT+0" for the bracket. When I type it, I hold down SHIFT with my right pinkie, and hit ";" with my middle finger. I then outstretch my pointer to hit 0. It's mostly a single fluid motion.

With Russian, you have to engage two hands instead of one. We have more letters in our alphabet so the ";" key is occupied by "ж" (a "zh" sound as G in Gerome), and the colon gets moved to "SHIFT+5". So now, to make the colon you have to first find "5" on the keyboard with your left hand, while holding down SHIFT with your right. Then you have to disengage your left hand, and reach for the 0 with your right to make the bracket. Rather than do all that, you can just place ")" and the context is enough to understand it's a smile.

It could also just be tradition. My earliest memories of the Russian internet are from the late 1990s, and the convention of "))))" was already in place.

  • Kinrany  5 years ago

    Using one vs two hands is a huge difference in convenience. I think this is the best version I've ever heard.

    • rcarmo  5 years ago

      It makes perfect sense. I don’t think people realize how much the US keyboard layout has shaped online culture.

koirapoika  5 years ago

Interesting observation: many people in the russian segment of the Internet use `)` instead of a period at the end of a sentence.

If you write a conventional sentence with a period, sometimes people might think you're not alright or even annoyed. Appending `:)` afterwards might be considered a sad smile. We have expressive parentheses and emojis here, but you put that sad smile, what's happened? It's all fine, I just follow the punctuations.

I find it curious that even using emotions in the Internet can be different within a single culture, not to mention others.

ribs  5 years ago

Dense Russian food must be stopping up their colons.

(Yes, children, that’s how I got thrown off of Hacker News)

maxgashkov  5 years ago

It's a long standing tradition from older forms of chat software (IRC, ICQ and so on) and yes, it seems endemic to Russian speakers for some reason. I always explained it to myself that it saves time and also by the fact that to type ":)" in Russian kb layout you have to press Shift+6, Shift+0 compared to Shift+;, Shift+0 in US layout which seems a bit more cumbersome.

Anyway, this is going away as most of the younger generation just uses emoji instead.