The Chuckle Point

In the postscript of a letter to Robert in October 1930, Frances Binkley invented the smiley. She and Robert and their year-old son Binks had driven up from Stanford in August to stay with her parents in Portland, Oregon, and Robert had then gone ahead to Cleveland to start his new job as head of the History Department at the College for Women, Western Reserve University. Frances’ family had tried to impress her with the sights of Portland, after she had been living in New York and Rome. To reinforce her filial mockery of their pretensions, she came up with a punctuation mark made up of a circular face with a little smile, and she called it the “chuckle point”.

 

Transcription:

I have been taken to see the big buildings in Portland & the view from the Columbia boulevarde and I am more humble now about being a Roman-New Yorker. It’s just like Eleanor Cogswell said. *

* p.s. There should be a punctuation mark to indicate amusement – a chuckle point. Let’s adopt this:

I don’t have any information about Elinor Cogswell’s remarks. She was city editor of the Palo Alto Times, and like Frances a northwesterner who came to Stanford (Frances came down from Lewiston, Idaho, but while she was at university her family moved to Portland). Cogswell knew the Binkleys through the Stanford English Club; there are a couple of brief letters from her in the family papers. She is, as far as I know, the only one in the Binkleys’ circle of friends to have a plaza named after her, in central Palo Alto.

I haven’t found evidence that either Robert or Frances used the chuckle point after this letter.