I DON’T WANT TO SEE THE EMOTICON FOR LOLITA

by Zoë Pollock

But I do like that Vladimir Nabokov dreamed up emoticons in 1969. A NYT interviewer asked him to rank himself among writers, living and of the recent past:

I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile – some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket, which I would now like to trace in reply to your question.