5:-) is %-( and 8-0

If anyone could translate the title of the post, I'd be thoroughly discouraged.

For those who have no clue what it means, it says: "Elvis Presley is confused and shocked."

It's written in one of the world's youngest languages: emoticon.

An article in the "Sunday Styles" section of today's New York Times describes the spread of emoticon from teenager's IMs to adult's workplaces.

"THERE was a time, of course, that emoticons seemed intrinsically youthful. Just as children shared the special ability to see Big Bird’s magical friend Snuffleupagus on “Sesame Street” — a character who was long supposed to be invisible to adults — they seemed to easily recognize that the characters 3:-o represented a cow, or that @>--> -- symbolized a rose or that ~(_8^(I) stood for Homer Simpson.

But after 25 years of use, emoticons have started to jump off the page and into our spoken language. Even grown men on Wall Street, for example, will weave the term 'QQ' (referring to an emoticon that symbolizes two eyes crying) into conversation as a sarcastic way of saying 'boo hoo,'" Alex Williams writes.

Before this post, I had never written a single word in emoticon--I'm not really the emotional type and emoticon was not offered at my high school. However, even if you do use the language, I think you'll have a hard time figuring out what some of the symbols mean. Below is a test of your emoticon IQ. The definition of each symbol can be found here. Good luck!

:-P

|-O

*\O/*

:-/

Try to translate this sentence:

JT is l:-( that the food is <*)))-{.

Here is a complete emoticon dictionary. It is very entertaining.