Could this be an early example of an emoticon?A historical newspaper specialist at the digital archival company Proquest believes he has found an example of a sideways winking smiley face embedded in The New York Times transcript of an 1862 speech given by President Lincoln. Other historians are not so sure, saying the semicolon alongside a closed parenthesis is either a mistake or a misinterpretation of something that is perfectly grammatical for that era. [Link]I vote for "misinterpretation of something that is perfectly grammatical for that era." I've seen plenty of 19th-century cases ...