"See You Then. J"

Do you ever get a random "J" at the end of an email. You probably have if you use Gmail (I'm not sure this happens in other email services). The person who sent you the email intended for a smiley face to show up. So why does it come across as a "J." Well, I decided to find out, and here is the answer via Yedda:

There are two possible reasons why it's J of all letters:

1. Microsoft? Gmail?? it must be a conspiracy!

or,

2. It's because in Windows, the Smiley character is created using the Wingdings font, where it occupies the same position that is occupied by J in textual fonts (like Arial).

In fact, when sending a smiley in an email, this is the HTML generated by Outlook:/p/ppspan style=";font-family:Wingdings;font-size:85%;" span style=";font-family:Wingdings;font-size:10;" J/span/span/pp/p/span

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So there you have it. Now you know that your friends really don't smoke crack while writing emails.

Note: I had to edit the quoted HTML because although Gmail doesn't translate it properly, blogger does (ie. before my edits an actual smiley face was showing up rather than the HTML). Click on the link above to see the true code.

[Photo brought to you by the letter J]