I caught up with some magazine reading the other day as I waited while the gents at the tire store installed new snow tires on my daughter’s car. On the table in the waiting room were the usual collection of outdated, dog-eared periodicals, most dealing with hunting, fishing and/or motor vehicles of various sorts. But amongst those not-so-intriguing titles was a familiar gold-framed cover: a National Geographic from July of this year. I actually have a subscription to the venerable magazine, but too often each month it arrives to sit forlornly on my coffee table with barely a glance from me — just too busy to sit down with it! I’ve loved this magazine since I was a young girl, so I happily snapped it up and devoured it, cover to cover, in the hour-plus I had. A single one-page article really caught my attention, and not because it featured one of those stunning photographs for which National Geographic is justifiably famous. Instead, it featured a simple series of emoticons with which most of us are familiar, created with a few strokes of our keyboards. You know, : – ) denotes a smile while ; – ) provides a sly wink. I was interested to read that while most of us may think of these little icons as a rather recent development, spread by smartphone keypads and emails alike, way back in 1881 an article entitled “Typographical Art” appeared in the magazine Puck and used keystrokes to depict facial expressions indicating joy, astonishment, melancholy and indifference. I also learned that although our world continues to shrink with ever-expanding technology and sophisticated gadgets, emoticons are not universally the same. In general, the eyes are the focus of Eastern Hemisphere emoticons while (with a tilt of the head) the emphasis is on the mouth in those common to the Western Hemisphere. Check out these examples (East on the left, West on the right): (^_^)      Happy   : – ) ( ; _ ; )     Sad       : – ( ( * o * )   Surprised     : O ( ^ _ ~ )  Winking      ; – ) ( ^ o ^ )  Laughing   : D As travelers, it is important for us to be aware of and sensitive to cultural differences in the places we visit. I found it interesting that those differences can even be evident in our most modern and mile-shrinking forms of communication. — Patty Vanikiotis, associate editor/copy editor