Dr. Owen Churches of Flinders University in Australia has learned that we are now reacting to emoticons in the same way that we would to a human face. In a study published in the Social Neuroscience Journal, it was found that when presented with images of humans, random strings of characters, and emoticons, participants' occipitotemporal cortex had the same response with both human faces and emoticons. This brain development has only taken 32 years to occur, as the first documented use of emoticon was in 1982 by Professor Scott Fahlman, pictured above.

Professor Scott Fahlman, a Carnegie Mellon computer scientist widely credited with creating the smiley emoticon, has spoken out against the graphic rendition of his beloved invention, calling it "ugly," and unimaginative.

You've got to hand it to an actor when they oblige the public with an embarrassing internet meme created about them. Watch James Van Der Beek brilliantly advertise his own "Van Der Memes" in this latest Funny or Die video.

Three-steps-from-crazy-cat-lady WSJ columnist Peggy Noonan is teaching at Harvard. Our spies report: "Peggy's a ridiculous, hilarious person to speaking with any authority on anything at all." They've provided us with her awesome quotes. We're presenting them emoticon-contextualized them for you.

Jennifer 8. Lee of the New York Times spent 1,523 words debating whether her paper used the very first emoticon in 1862 when it printed the text of an Abraham Lincoln speech.

Strunk and White would not be pleased: