How can I prevent an emoticon from displaying??

There are 2 solutions:

• Solution 1: Disable the display of all emoticons. This is done by turning off the Icon Transformation, see Rendering Transformation configuration for details on how to do that.

• Solution 2: Escape the text representing the emoticon so that it's not displayed as an emoticon. For example if you have:
  This is fun :)

  You can escape it using XWiki Syntax 2.0+ by using the verbatim syntax ({{{...}}}), as follows:

  This is fun {{{:)}}}