I don't want to just jump in with some negative comment here but let's start with being honest - 95% of this post is about the history of emojis, how to use them, and what they mean. Which is a helluva lot of information about emojis for an article that concludes that they enjoyed NOT using emojis, and doesn't really have any substantive conclusion to make about things or any follow up.
Without unnecessary information about the history of emojis, this would have been the entire article:
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When was the last time you went a day without using any emoji? How about a week? In March 2021, I went through a fun self-imposed experiment: no emoji for 2 weeks. Not on social media, not in private messages, not even as Slack or Discord reactions. No emoticon either: the goal was to communicate without illustrations, only with words. I did a semi-rigorous (a.k.a. half-assed) diary study, taking notes on my feelings and behaviour.
Here’s what I wanted to find out:
How does the lack of emoji affect my conversations with others?
Will other aspects of my interactions be affected?
My hypothesis was “I will somehow want to compensate for the lack of emoji.”
So, what did happen when I stopped using emojis?
On the first day of my experiment, I was already worrying that I wasn’t warm enough, or wasn’t conveying my reactions well enough. On the second day, I missed using emojis. It hadn’t even been 48 hours, but the good stuff comes when you push through, so I kept at it. On the third day, finally, I started feeling good about this. I wrote:
“This is actually cool, I don't know if I want to get back to emojis. Maybe I just needed to get the habit out of my system.”
No shit, Sherlock.
In the first few days, I did have to edit emojis out of my messages, as I was using them reflexively. During this experiment, I pondered about the importance of emojis to convey banter, being concerned that without them, I’d simply come across as mean.
In the end, I found myself adding a lot of exclamation marks, "hahaha", and writing more sentences to better communicate my mood. The need to better convey my messages forced me to have a deeper understanding what I was trying to communicate in the first place. Sometimes, a heart means “I love you”, “I miss you”, “I hope you’ll feel better soon”, “I love what you’re saying”, etc. Was I expecting my interlocutors to guess the exact meaning? I’m happy that it forced me to phrase my thoughts, look deeper into them, better identify and express them. I had to write "Thank you" or "That's great!" instead of adding a reaction emoji under a Slack message, Twitter DM, or Discord message, and I like to believe that those words carried more value than one more thumbs up added to the pile.
Ever since my 2-week experiment ended, and I started operating with emojis again, I’ve been paying more attention to what I write. I prefer using emoji on top of self-sufficient phrasing. I want to make sure that my messages are clear enough without emoji, and only then might I add one, spending it on expendable flair rather than something meaning is reliant on.
I wholeheartedly invite you to carry out this experiment for yourself. Who knows what fantastic feeling or intriguing behaviour you might uncover?
And that’s all it needed to be to convey the same message, despite the author talking about needing to watch their words more carefully during the experiment.
However, for anyone who does happen to be interested in the history of emoji, Keith Houston's Shady Characters blog has a ten(!) part series [0] on them.
Hip youngster here. ^^'s meaning as a smiley face comes from East Asian emoticons (somewhere like Japan or Korea, I'm not sure), where it's pretty much always represented a sort of laughing smiley face like you see in anime-style drawings sometimes -- like a short version of (＠＾◡＾). People also still use it to mean "the thing above this message", though.
The easiest way to differentiate it it to use a different number of carets for the "thing above this message" meaning. I like to use one caret for each message, so like if I was referring to the comment directly above mine it'd be ^ and for three messages up it'd be ^^^. You can also use context and position; usually I expect emoticons to appear at the end of a sentence while ^^^ appears at the start.
All of these, and various other combinations, are pretty old -in internet time, I guess-. They are usually known as "upright emoticons" [0], as opposed to "sideways emoticons".
^_^ gets abbreviated to ^^ and that's how you get it to be a smile.
I hate this so much. Facebook Messenger does this too, in fact almost every app does. They've banned the old style smileys altogether -- there's no possible way to send a message containing one -- and it really bothers me.
If I type punctuation, I want the punctuation, if I wanted the emoji I would have typed the damn emoji. I can't believe anyone thought altering people's messages without their consent was a good idea.
Emojis are fine in text messages and IM/Slack. I don't think its a good idea to use Emojis in technical documentation, terminal cli apps, package managers (I'm looking at you npm), long form articles, PRs and code reviews, etc. I just find them distracting since they stand out strongly in a block of text - eyes instantly gravitate to colorful emojis in a rather smooth flow of text.
> I don't think its a good idea to use Emojis in technical documentation, terminal cli apps, package managers (I'm looking at you npm), long form articles, PRs and code reviews, etc.
Completely agree. I also find emoji in commit messages [1] to be far more ambiguous than their text equivalents.
Emojis solve the problem of texting being inefficient at the expense of ceding a lot of the expressiveness to someone else. Suddenly committees are deciding what you mean. Turns out that for a lot of people, thats fine.
Very different, in fact. Yes, language is socially and culturally determined, but it is incredibly organic and expressive. A small counsel of people deciding which emotions can be expressed, and how, is entirely different.
1984 taught us the dangers of a limited and/or artificially created vocabulary. Are the lessons not the same today?
People impute alternate meanings to words all the time. Such as "nasty" being flipped to meaning "cool". There's nothing constraining people from using emojis to mean things different from what they are defined to be.
For example, the wallstreetbets subreddit has their own local meanings for various icons.
Note that all alphabets started out as emojis. The vocabulary was, of course, very limited, and the emojis gradually got shortened, simplified, and turned into a sound, then stringing the sounds together meant a rich set of words could be formed. Did you know that the letter 'A' was originally a picture of a bull's head?
We need a committee for the English Language to come up with new words that express common phenomena for which we don't currently have words. Like, for instance, the action of searching one's self for keys and phone before changing locations. Or a word for people who stare at their phone too often in social situations.
The current letters weren't engineered to remove the ability to say something, as with emojis.
There have been political changes to dictionary entries, but most languages have many dictionaries and nobody can actually force you to change meanings or not use words you want to use.
With Unicode, there's a single global entity that decides everything.
I wonder if this this is a generational thing or what other factors are at play: My peer group and I might use the occasional smiley, but it is exceeding rare that I would use any emoji for anything. I also don't see many emojis in messages to me.
I'm sure it's a generational thing. The only place I actually see a lot of emoji use is stuff reposted on Reddit, usually corporate twitter accounts and MLM marketeers.
The main use I have for emoji is in the emoji-reactions in the Slack that we have to use at my current company.
The emoji-reaction this way is a kludge for a lower-priority asynchronous response that doesn't interrupt people with a notification (like a message would). They'll see the response when they return to the view.
The thing that makes me sad about Slack emoji reactions is that across Windows and Mac users, Slack defaults to a different emoji for the check mark. In particular the default check mark that Windows users will be invited to use, is hard to see if the receiver is using a dark theme on their device.
Note: this was a few months ago, my company switched to a different platform so maybe it's been fixed in the meantime
> that doesn't interrupt people with a notification [...] The emoji-reaction this way is a kludge for a lower-priority asynchronous response
Isn't the entire premiss of Slack that it is asynchronous? That it does not interrupt the flow in the way a phonecall or tap-on-shoulder does?
What went wrong that now the senders of communication have to -again- tread carefully, be aware of the receivers status and work, employ kludges, so not to interrupt co-workers?
I love the core set of smiley face emoji, but skip most of the rest because they’re either too hard to find or too easy to misunderstand.
I’d be interested in a comparison between emoji & a character-based language like Chinese or a hieroglyphic language like ancient Egyptian… Any good articles out there on that topic? As an amateur observer of languages, it seems like the purpose & grammar of the emoji set isn’t well enough defined. Maybe some of the emoji are adjectives & should only appear once a verb or noun emoji is picked… Maybe “watermelon” should be a compound of “water” and “melon”…
Are there any notable emoji keyboard experiments out there? I wonder if anyone has tried organizing emoji like a Chinese keyboard (which I have seen & used, but may misunderstand since I don’t read Chinese).
> I’d be interested in a comparison between emoji & a character-based language like Chinese or a hieroglyphic language like ancient Egyptian…
I don’t know of any articles, but from what I know of the subject there is no comparison. Chinese and Egyptian writing systems both have the capability to represent any word or sentence in their respective languages. They do this using a combination of pictograms, ideograms and phonetic symbols. (Though the exact structure differs between writing systems: Chinese tends to combine these components into one character, while Egyptian tends to keep them more separate.) By contrast, emojis can only represent a very limited number of words, and are always pictograms or ideograms.
Of course, there’s nothing stopping you from turning emoji into a complete writing system, and inventing a language and grammar around it. But emojis as they are used today do not constitute a complete writing system.
Sure, but in that case you’d need to have some sort of convention for what each combination represents, and at that point you’ve basically invented a whole new writing system based on emoji. As I said previously:
> Of course, there’s nothing stopping you from turning emoji into a complete writing system, and inventing a language and grammar around it. But emojis as they are used today do not constitute a complete writing system.
In Egyptian hieroglyphs, the equivalent of saying "smoke" would be using a smile, an open mouth and an ok sign to indicate the sounds "sm - oh - ok." Rather than, for instance, showing a picture of a cigarette.
IIRC it would actually have those phonetic components plus a picture of a cigarette or some other semantic determiner. I’m not sure if many Egyptian words were written purely phonetically, though I’m hardly an expert on this topic.
[EDIT: Just checked Loprieno’s Egyptian grammar, which says on the topic: ‘While some words of common use … are written only phonologically, i.e. only with a combination of consonantal signs … many items of the basic vocabulary of Egyptian are expressed by semagrams which indicate their own semantic meaning. They do this iconically (by reproducing the object itself), through rebus (by portraying an entity whose name displays a similar phonological structure), or symbolically (by depicting an item metaphorically or metonymically associated with the object)’.]
Yeah, it would be most likely have a determinative symbol showing a mouth, hand or person to indicate the action — less likely to have the action itself (a person smoking a cigarette or a cigarette itself).
Ever since emoji became popular worldwide, I’ve been wondering if they will become the basis for new international written languages—languages that convey complex meanings using productive grammar.
In written Chinese and Japanese, the order of ideographs—which is what emoji are—can change the meaning. In Japanese, for example, 足下 means “near one’s feet; nearby” while 下足 means “footwear”; 行先 means “destination” while 先行 means “preceding.” The readings vary depending on the combination as well; the four combinations above are pronounced ashimoto, gesoku, yukisaki, and senkō (as well as sakiyuki), respectively.
Some ideographs, like 有 “to possess,” function in multicharacter combinations as verbs, while others, like 人 “person,” function as nouns.
I'm wondering if, over time, similar grammars might emerge with emoji. For example, the combination [OK Hand] [Grinning Face with Sweat] might acquire a different meaning from [Grinning Face with Sweat] [OK Hand]. Certain emoji, like, say, [Person Walking], might come to function as verbs.
If such new written languages do emerge, they are likely to be specific to particular online communities. Looking through comments on Instagram for posts with the hashtags #crochet or #hanggliding, for example, I notice posts like [1] and [2], in which the comments are in several different languages. Perhaps partly to aid understanding across linguistic barriers, many comments have emoji appended to them, and some comments are emoji only. As near as I can tell, the order in which emoji are used in those comments doesn’t have any grammatical significance. But perhaps, somewhere on the Internet, emoji grammars are in the process of emerging.
> In written Chinese and Japanese, the order of ideographs—which is what emoji are—can change the meaning. In Japanese, for example, 足下 means “near one’s feet; nearby” while 下足 means “footwear”; 行先 means “destination” while 先行 means “preceding.” The readings vary depending on the combination as well; the four combinations above are pronounced ashimoto, gesoku, yukisaki, and senkō (as well as sakiyuki), respectively.
It’s worth remembering here that Japanese is quite unusual amongst logographic writing systems in having so many readings for each character. My understanding is that many characters were loaned multiple times from different stages of Chinese, as well as being given separate Japanese readings; also there are many irregular spellings, which I believe are quite unusual in logographies. (In some ways it’s as bad as English spelling rules.) Thus, I doubt that any descendant of emojis would end up like this.
> Some ideographs, like 有 “to possess,” function in multicharacter combinations as verbs, while others, like 人 “person,” function as nouns.
I’m not quite sure what you mean here… could you give an example please?
> If such new written languages do emerge, they are likely to be specific to particular online communities. Looking through comments on Instagram for posts with the hashtags #crochet or #hanggliding, for example, I notice posts like [1] and [2], in which the comments are in several different languages. Perhaps partly to aid understanding across linguistic barriers, many comments have emoji appended to them, and some comments are emoji only.
These examples are interesting. They don’t remind me of logographies at all, but rather of something quite different, namely ideophones: ‘A vivid representation of an idea in sound’ (Doke 1935). Like ideophones, the emojis in these examples are sentence-peripheral, act grammatically and semantically as modifiers, and are highly phonologically/orthographically distinct from the rest of the text. If anything, I suspect emojis would most likely evolve into some kind of ideophone-like system. (I personally think Mark Rosenfelder’s uɣoso [https://www.zompist.com/mars/modern-hanying.html#Implants] are a particularly good attempt at projecting this into the future.)
有線 <to possess> + <line; wire> “wired” (as in “wired Internet connection”)
Here are a couple of examples where the verb-like character 有 is preceded by an adverb-like character:
共有 <together> + <to possess> “joint ownership”
現有 <presently> + <to possess> “existing; current”
Many of these combinations, and the patterns by which they are formed, originated in Chinese, which is why many have a Verb + Object order. Chinese is a verb-medial, or SVO, language, while Japanese is SOV.
The grammar that influences the formation of these combinations (called jukugo in Japanese) is productive, in the sense that new combinations can be formed and used based on the same rules, but it is not as productive as the grammar of sentence formation. Most of the jukugo that one encounters in writing and, especially, in speech are fixed vocabulary items and are treated as words, not as phrases or sentences. Their etymology, however, is usually clear in writing and aids in their understanding; that is one advantage of ideographs, and it also makes it easier to create neologisms when writing. In speech, because many characters are pronounced the same, it is more difficult to use novel combinations and still be understood.
> If anything, I suspect emojis would most likely evolve into some kind of ideophone-like system.
That certainly seems possible, too. I suspect, though, that if they evolve into anything, it will be many different linguistic systems, for many different online communities.
> Japanese is quite unusual amongst logographic writing systems in having so many readings for each character. ... Thus, I doubt that any descendant of emojis would end up like this.
Unless emoji acquire readings from a variety of languages, which seems possible, as they are already being used online in multilingual contexts. Let’s wait and see!
I don't have good examples for you but yes, in text messages I've enjoyed trying to talk with friends in emojis-only mode. It's a great exercise for how much you can assume about people you're close to (read each others minds, finish each others sentences etc)
And yes, [Person Walking] means to go somewhere, like 去
That sounds like fun! It will be interesting to see if emoji-only modes also come into use as a lingua franca among people without a shared conventional language.
Part of this article touches on why I don't use emoji[1] - I don't know what they will look to the recipient most of the time. At least with emoticons/kaomoji, I have a decent idea. In most cases, it probably doesn't matter, but I can see it causing a miscommunication in some circumstances.
[1] Side question: what's the accepted plural of emoji in English? "Emojis" looks wrong to me, but I suspect that's because I speak a little Japanese.
TL;DR: due to the influence of Japanese, it seems that most people who are familiar with Japanese will use its default form -i. As this loan word starts to become more prominent in the English language, the classic plural form -s should gain in popularity, such as it has been the case with ninjas or haikus.
If a word is borrowed from another language and becomes common place, you can use the plural form of your language. Do you say “5 pizzas“ or “5 pizze“? A notable exception are Latin words, e.g. index -> indices (if you want oto sound well educated).
The japanese plural of “emoji“ would be “emoji“ (they have no plural form)
EDIT: I'm not saying it's wrong to use the native plural form, though!
English has several nouns that don't change in their plural form: fish, sheep, aircraft, species, etc. Often this is because the originating language had no special plural form. I would therefore say that "emoji" is the correct pluralization of "emoji" in english.
Emojis are extremely useful for personality matching on Tinder. My favourite is the non-smoking emoji as I would never date a person who is smoking, but there are many other things that I love in life and emojis give me a way to communicate them visually.
Interesting, given the examples in this article and [1] of confusion and miscommunication caused by differences in how different platforms depict the same emoji.
So in the context of online dating, does that mean that humans are now selecting for the best compatibility between users of the same mobile platforms? :)
I can see how some apps decided to switch to their own emoji sets...
Some people add them after nouns on their Facebook updates, e.g. my last sentence would have the "man and woman" emoji after the word "people". So their posts look like my kindergarten worksheet where we had to complete sentences by identifying the pictures and filling in the blank space next to them.
Reading about how they have carefully designed the pictures to prevent people from communicating certain things, it reminds me of the language in Orwell's 1984 which was a simplistic and limited language designed to make it impossible to dissent.
If you mention 1984 at all today, the anti-1984 police will come and complain that you'd dare compare anything in modern society to the dystopia in the book, even though I wasn't implying there was any repression. To me it's just an interesting similarity.
What did I say? I was just saying they literally tried to prevent you from saying specific things with the designs of the icons, and made the connection. I didn't say they weren't fun.
And as a general advantage emoji isn't trying to replace words. Nobody is (as far as I know) required to use emoji. People can pick and choose when they want them.
The point is that it's a political choice to give people the ability to communicate through emojis while removing it from others (e.g. the gun example).
OTOH its a dictionary of ideograms that gets extended every year in a fairly democratic way: anyone can suggest or propose an emoji, which is quite different than the English Oxford Dictionary.
One thing I really dislike is the aesthetics of the Apple emoji. One could say "then don't use it", but so many sites and apps are shipping an entire emoji set. With the exception of Facebook and Twitter who have made their own brand of emoji, a lot of apps are just shipping Google or Microsoft or Apple's and instead of matching your system, it completely clashes and is a waste of bandwidth. If you're on Linux, it's a total dice roll which their design team should be the 'default'.
I actually went a step further and stopped using words, because it turns out people also interpret them differently. Some people, for example, cannot read sarcasm.
Now I use sequent calculus, and make sure that every term is well-defined before I use it.
...After reading the first half of your comment, I thought you were serious. Only after the second half did it finally dawn on me that you were probably being sarcastic. Seriously.
Good job reading the entire comment and using context to suss out the likely meaning and intent behind the words. That's actually a pretty rare skill these days in many parts of the Internet. ;)
Be sure to include the considerations that went into standardizing the spellings to make sure that we can't express dangerous ideas with doubleplusungood words.
I recently found that having emoji fonts breaks my terminal. This bug will probably eventually be fixed so I didn't think too hard before removing emoji from my system. I don't use them myself and personally have not noticed them ever being used with a decent signal-to-noise ratio. I have come to associate them with snide or political remarks on Twitter and clickbait articles.
I agree with the author that when people use emoji they are leaving large parts of their intent and feelings ambiguous and can be more specific (and will force themselves to think more about what they are really trying to convey) with textual messages.
Something I found interesting in the emoji usages in China:
1. In Wechat "emoji" is a superset that also includes memes, where you can use any kind of image as an emoji also add other's emoji to your library (kinda like slack emoji, but bigger and more emphasized). The humor and expressiveness is immense, people use them for daily conversations instead of a quick reaction tool (well that too). Everyone's emoji lib is vastly different and it says a lot about you as a person, it's almost like a personal language.
2. The "Smile" emoji in Wechat actually means hostility [0] in younger generations ("it could mean that you just said something really dumb and the sender doesn’t want to speak to you"). Some older generations folks don't "get" it and still use them for good intent. It's always weird to see your parents send you that.
Re (2) you misread - it's the "waving hand" emoji which can mean a bad reaction to something dumb. The "plain smile" emoji is rarely used with friends, in favour of laughter-focused images, which I don't think is unique to Wechat.
> Re (2) you misread - it's the "waving hand" emoji which can mean a bad reaction to something dumb.
This is where things get complicated: How can I know you're right and they're wrong? Thats no different to indirect references to things and people: so "dear leader" is understood to refer to the DPRK but in fact, contextually can be used to refer to any upward manager.
The inherent ambiguity of meaning is a problem in all communication and across both words, and shapes, it's meaning is highly contextual, and I would suggest fluid: in 5 years time this specific wechat emoji/emoticon meaning will have shifted.
"fab" probably had about 4-5 years of real currency in the 1960s. Now, its use is mostly confined to the near geriatrics or ironically. (and, to kids who watch "thunderbirds" F.A.B. probably lacks context)
"Dear leader" is a really good example of how you can get yourself into awkward situations if you're not aware of certain historic precedents. Another example: in Germany, nobody would call their boss "mein Führer", although "Führer" is the literal translation of "leader"...
Perhaps not unique to Wechat, but still a cultural thing.
In Europe a plain smile is still just that, a plain smile. Reserving it for communication with your manager or boss, is not how it is used.
The LOL or ROFL emoji is to me out of place, as you don't roll on the floor laughing while sending text messages.
Laughing out loud is ok from time to time.
Still, emojis are better when they have a global meaning, e.g. the simplest interpretation possible.
Yep, in the UK for example the crying laughing emoji has mixed meaning depending on context.
It still has the innocent “this is really funny” meaning but it’s also known as the “c*%t emoji”[1] after English comedian David Baddiel noticed that anti-Semitic trolls would always sign off their messages to him with it.
He was able to turn his experiences into a stage show called “Trolls, not the dolls”[2].
1. For those that don’t know, in this context “c#%^” is a nasty but non gender specific insult that might be used for anyone being particularly unpleasant.
A lot of things may have a different meaning depending on the context, not only words or text: even face expressions. You sometimes need to know the person to understand what they truly meant.
I'd say the absolute majority of crying laughing emojis I've seen on Twitter are either used by trolls (usually to ridicule statements without having to actually engage with them directly) or as a seemingly meaningless filler or sign-off in extremely hostile replies. It effectively being used in the place of an insult would explain the latter use.
Regarding #1, SameTime (the instant chat part of Lotus Notes) allowed you to add any still image or gif as an emoji. Definitely something I missed when we moved to a different platform.
I tend to find people who don't like emoji to be slightly racist. Given emoji started in Japan, they get this "ewww, who wants the foreign shit in my text". Even HN is slightly racist on this front. The fact that an entire culture embraced them and that you reject them is not racism with a capital R but is arguably in the gray area of, probably unintended, micro aggressions. You're basically telling an entire culture to go F themselves.
If you don't like racism tag, then how about sexism. I'm pretty confident women use more emoji than men and I've seen plenty of female engineer's tech blog posts showing lots of emoji in their terminal prompts etc. So, assuming I'm correct, not supporting them is arguably sexist since you're effectively telling women "sorry, your preferred mode of expressing yourself is disallowed."
I get that the blog post is about not using them personally and that's of course 100% fine. But if you're judging people on if they use them or not, or if you're making systems that don't support them, please reconsider.
We're talking about peppering one's writing with brightly colored little pictures. If a dislike of that is anything, it's ageist: I don't want the way I write to give people the impression that I'm a ten year old.
This is a pretty big leap to be honest - and this argument can be made for nearly anything if you look for it.
For example: emoji are difficult for vision impaired people to work with, and use of emoji to convey meaning reduces accessibility. You could argue that using emoji or advocating for emoji use is ableist.
Wow, this is such a wrong way of interpreting the way things are, that you're finding offense where none was probably intended.
Have you ever witnessed the "eww, foreign shit" thought process, or did you invent this in your head? Emojis are used all over the world that I can't imagine anyone thinking they're a "Japanese thing". Yeah they're from Japan but your imaginary racism accusation is so weird to me, if it's real, to me it would be like meeting someone who does not use flush toilets because s/he doesn't like the British.
There are technical reasons for not supporting Unicode, e.g. to prevent garbling like https://www.zalgo.org/ , but throwing things like "not supporting emojis (I'm going to mansplain to you that emojis is part of Unicode) is sexist is just... Argh! For your own sake, I suggest you stop it with the identity politics and looking to be butthurt by any perceived offense, it won't lead to a life of happiness, and you'd be the irrational one who's looking for conflict, sadly while believing you're the sane one in a holy crusade against infidels. (Ha, for the sake of analogy, it's just like Isis/Al-Qaeda think they're the righteous ones whereas the rest of the world sees them as the bad guys).
I don't know why I want to save people from themselves in an HN comment box, but here's me trying. Although I think you're already so offended that you'll totally ignore this.
Why is it ok on HN to write "That's funny lol" but not ok to write "That's funny :emoji-for-laugh:". Sure I get that no offense is intended but if twice as many women prefer the second form over the first then HN is unintentionally preferring male communication over female communication.
It's not like it would be hard for HN to enable support. In fact they're intentionally disallowing it. I'm sure they have their reasons. I'm just pointing out that the results happen to affect women more than men
Your theory about racists disliking emojis because they come from Japan doesn't make much sense. Haven't you noticed the affinity [fetish?] modern racists have for Japan in particular? White supremacist weebs seem paradoxical but nonetheless they're very prevalent. It probably has a lot to do with 4chan, their admiration for the ethnic homogeneity of Japan, Japan's history in WWII and authoritarianism into the present.
> Apple announced that it was going to replace its realistic gun emoji by a water gun emoji. Immediately afterwards, Microsoft took the opposite stance and changed its gun emoji from a toy to a genuine-looking one, arguing that it was better aligned with the Unicode standard and with users’ expectation of a gun emoji.
The title hits home, strongly... I have rarely used emojis (let alone I don't have any social media profile, plus only conversate through mails with few people). One thing I realized is the use of emojis from the other side evokes a sense of "I don't want to see emojis...". I don't know why, but I just feel that emojis kinda make me feel that the conversation isn't "deep"; it doesn't convey the actual emotions... In hindsight, I also feel a few-word replies are often disengaging. Probably it's just me. But it's been years I haven't used emojis. I don't even have the urge to use it or see it.
On the contrary, I do believe that using emojis in certain contexts are better. For instance, when you are euphoric and someone sends you a "happy-like" emoji, it makes you feel more "connected".
Emoji helped make most apps and websites support Unicode, which is cool. I'd rather use the little unique emoticons most forums had though. They were fun and could be personalized for each community.
I never understood Emojis beyond the text-based smilies. I'm the one who disables "Convert my text smiley to icons" in the WordPress preferences every time I install one, ever since it was introduced.
I have a 13-year old daughter, and she explained to me that my text-based smilies when converted becomes those old-school emojis. These can be interpreted in various ways by the millennials. I tried learning the new emojis and tried few times; but my daughter laughed at me, and asked me to stopped and instead she stopped using emojis with me. She texts me in full sentences while conversing with me.
I was neither in the SMS-esque shortened text bandwagon. I hated texting until iPhone came out. Still never got used to emojis.
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When was the last time you went a day without using any emoji? How about a week? In March 2021, I went through a fun self-imposed experiment: no emoji for 2 weeks. Not on social media, not in private messages, not even as Slack or Discord reactions. No emoticon either: the goal was to communicate without illustrations, only with words. I did a semi-rigorous (a.k.a. half-assed) diary study, taking notes on my feelings and behaviour.
Here’s what I wanted to find out:
How does the lack of emoji affect my conversations with others?
Will other aspects of my interactions be affected?
My hypothesis was “I will somehow want to compensate for the lack of emoji.”
So, what did happen when I stopped using emojis?
On the first day of my experiment, I was already worrying that I wasn’t warm enough, or wasn’t conveying my reactions well enough. On the second day, I missed using emojis. It hadn’t even been 48 hours, but the good stuff comes when you push through, so I kept at it. On the third day, finally, I started feeling good about this. I wrote:
“This is actually cool, I don't know if I want to get back to emojis. Maybe I just needed to get the habit out of my system.”
No shit, Sherlock.
In the first few days, I did have to edit emojis out of my messages, as I was using them reflexively. During this experiment, I pondered about the importance of emojis to convey banter, being concerned that without them, I’d simply come across as mean.
In the end, I found myself adding a lot of exclamation marks, "hahaha", and writing more sentences to better communicate my mood. The need to better convey my messages forced me to have a deeper understanding what I was trying to communicate in the first place. Sometimes, a heart means “I love you”, “I miss you”, “I hope you’ll feel better soon”, “I love what you’re saying”, etc. Was I expecting my interlocutors to guess the exact meaning? I’m happy that it forced me to phrase my thoughts, look deeper into them, better identify and express them. I had to write "Thank you" or "That's great!" instead of adding a reaction emoji under a Slack message, Twitter DM, or Discord message, and I like to believe that those words carried more value than one more thumbs up added to the pile.
Ever since my 2-week experiment ended, and I started operating with emojis again, I’ve been paying more attention to what I write. I prefer using emoji on top of self-sufficient phrasing. I want to make sure that my messages are clear enough without emoji, and only then might I add one, spending it on expendable flair rather than something meaning is reliant on.
I wholeheartedly invite you to carry out this experiment for yourself. Who knows what fantastic feeling or intriguing behaviour you might uncover?
[0] https://shadycharacters.co.uk/2018/08/emoji-part-1-in-the-be...
edit: HackerNews strips render emoji. It should be this: https://emojipedia.org/smiling-face-with-smiling-eyes/
this is where I'd use the clapping emoji
The easiest way to differentiate it it to use a different number of carets for the "thing above this message" meaning. I like to use one caret for each message, so like if I was referring to the comment directly above mine it'd be ^ and for three messages up it'd be ^^^. You can also use context and position; usually I expect emoticons to appear at the end of a sentence while ^^^ appears at the start.
^_^ gets abbreviated to ^^ and that's how you get it to be a smile.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emoticons
Turn that frown upside down!
):
Settings -> Messages & Media -> Convert my typed emoticons to emoji
Following link, I'm surprised there's so many platform specific :) variants
If I type punctuation, I want the punctuation, if I wanted the emoji I would have typed the damn emoji. I can't believe anyone thought altering people's messages without their consent was a good idea.
Completely agree. I also find emoji in commit messages [1] to be far more ambiguous than their text equivalents.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21760021
Not any different from using the alphabet and words.
1984 taught us the dangers of a limited and/or artificially created vocabulary. Are the lessons not the same today?
For example, the wallstreetbets subreddit has their own local meanings for various icons.
Note that all alphabets started out as emojis. The vocabulary was, of course, very limited, and the emojis gradually got shortened, simplified, and turned into a sound, then stringing the sounds together meant a rich set of words could be formed. Did you know that the letter 'A' was originally a picture of a bull's head?
There have been political changes to dictionary entries, but most languages have many dictionaries and nobody can actually force you to change meanings or not use words you want to use.
With Unicode, there's a single global entity that decides everything.
The emoji-reaction this way is a kludge for a lower-priority asynchronous response that doesn't interrupt people with a notification (like a message would). They'll see the response when they return to the view.
Note: this was a few months ago, my company switched to a different platform so maybe it's been fixed in the meantime
Isn't the entire premiss of Slack that it is asynchronous? That it does not interrupt the flow in the way a phonecall or tap-on-shoulder does?
What went wrong that now the senders of communication have to -again- tread carefully, be aware of the receivers status and work, employ kludges, so not to interrupt co-workers?
I’d be interested in a comparison between emoji & a character-based language like Chinese or a hieroglyphic language like ancient Egyptian… Any good articles out there on that topic? As an amateur observer of languages, it seems like the purpose & grammar of the emoji set isn’t well enough defined. Maybe some of the emoji are adjectives & should only appear once a verb or noun emoji is picked… Maybe “watermelon” should be a compound of “water” and “melon”…
Are there any notable emoji keyboard experiments out there? I wonder if anyone has tried organizing emoji like a Chinese keyboard (which I have seen & used, but may misunderstand since I don’t read Chinese).
I don’t know of any articles, but from what I know of the subject there is no comparison. Chinese and Egyptian writing systems both have the capability to represent any word or sentence in their respective languages. They do this using a combination of pictograms, ideograms and phonetic symbols. (Though the exact structure differs between writing systems: Chinese tends to combine these components into one character, while Egyptian tends to keep them more separate.) By contrast, emojis can only represent a very limited number of words, and are always pictograms or ideograms.
Of course, there’s nothing stopping you from turning emoji into a complete writing system, and inventing a language and grammar around it. But emojis as they are used today do not constitute a complete writing system.
But in combination, they can represent many more, surely, just like hieroglyphs or Chinese characters?
> Of course, there’s nothing stopping you from turning emoji into a complete writing system, and inventing a language and grammar around it. But emojis as they are used today do not constitute a complete writing system.
[EDIT: Just checked Loprieno’s Egyptian grammar, which says on the topic: ‘While some words of common use … are written only phonologically, i.e. only with a combination of consonantal signs … many items of the basic vocabulary of Egyptian are expressed by semagrams which indicate their own semantic meaning. They do this iconically (by reproducing the object itself), through rebus (by portraying an entity whose name displays a similar phonological structure), or symbolically (by depicting an item metaphorically or metonymically associated with the object)’.]
Here is a nice Unicode dictionary https://mjn.host.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/egyptian/unicode/tablem...
In written Chinese and Japanese, the order of ideographs—which is what emoji are—can change the meaning. In Japanese, for example, 足下 means “near one’s feet; nearby” while 下足 means “footwear”; 行先 means “destination” while 先行 means “preceding.” The readings vary depending on the combination as well; the four combinations above are pronounced ashimoto, gesoku, yukisaki, and senkō (as well as sakiyuki), respectively.
Some ideographs, like 有 “to possess,” function in multicharacter combinations as verbs, while others, like 人 “person,” function as nouns.
I'm wondering if, over time, similar grammars might emerge with emoji. For example, the combination [OK Hand] [Grinning Face with Sweat] might acquire a different meaning from [Grinning Face with Sweat] [OK Hand]. Certain emoji, like, say, [Person Walking], might come to function as verbs.
If such new written languages do emerge, they are likely to be specific to particular online communities. Looking through comments on Instagram for posts with the hashtags #crochet or #hanggliding, for example, I notice posts like [1] and [2], in which the comments are in several different languages. Perhaps partly to aid understanding across linguistic barriers, many comments have emoji appended to them, and some comments are emoji only. As near as I can tell, the order in which emoji are used in those comments doesn’t have any grammatical significance. But perhaps, somewhere on the Internet, emoji grammars are in the process of emerging.
[1] https://www.instagram.com/p/CRHvQF-DXVE/
[2] https://www.instagram.com/p/CQ8eXf6CKaA/
It’s worth remembering here that Japanese is quite unusual amongst logographic writing systems in having so many readings for each character. My understanding is that many characters were loaned multiple times from different stages of Chinese, as well as being given separate Japanese readings; also there are many irregular spellings, which I believe are quite unusual in logographies. (In some ways it’s as bad as English spelling rules.) Thus, I doubt that any descendant of emojis would end up like this.
> Some ideographs, like 有 “to possess,” function in multicharacter combinations as verbs, while others, like 人 “person,” function as nouns.
I’m not quite sure what you mean here… could you give an example please?
> If such new written languages do emerge, they are likely to be specific to particular online communities. Looking through comments on Instagram for posts with the hashtags #crochet or #hanggliding, for example, I notice posts like [1] and [2], in which the comments are in several different languages. Perhaps partly to aid understanding across linguistic barriers, many comments have emoji appended to them, and some comments are emoji only.
These examples are interesting. They don’t remind me of logographies at all, but rather of something quite different, namely ideophones: ‘A vivid representation of an idea in sound’ (Doke 1935). Like ideophones, the emojis in these examples are sentence-peripheral, act grammatically and semantically as modifiers, and are highly phonologically/orthographically distinct from the rest of the text. If anything, I suspect emojis would most likely evolve into some kind of ideophone-like system. (I personally think Mark Rosenfelder’s uɣoso [https://www.zompist.com/mars/modern-hanying.html#Implants] are a particularly good attempt at projecting this into the future.)
Here are three two-character combinations in Japanese in which the first kanji 有 functions as a verb and the second kanji as a noun:
有人 <to possess> + <person> “manned” (as in “a manned spacecraft”)
有力 <to possess> + <strength> “powerful; influential”
有線 <to possess> + <line; wire> “wired” (as in “wired Internet connection”)
Here are a couple of examples where the verb-like character 有 is preceded by an adverb-like character:
共有 <together> + <to possess> “joint ownership”
現有 <presently> + <to possess> “existing; current”
Many of these combinations, and the patterns by which they are formed, originated in Chinese, which is why many have a Verb + Object order. Chinese is a verb-medial, or SVO, language, while Japanese is SOV.
The grammar that influences the formation of these combinations (called jukugo in Japanese) is productive, in the sense that new combinations can be formed and used based on the same rules, but it is not as productive as the grammar of sentence formation. Most of the jukugo that one encounters in writing and, especially, in speech are fixed vocabulary items and are treated as words, not as phrases or sentences. Their etymology, however, is usually clear in writing and aids in their understanding; that is one advantage of ideographs, and it also makes it easier to create neologisms when writing. In speech, because many characters are pronounced the same, it is more difficult to use novel combinations and still be understood.
> If anything, I suspect emojis would most likely evolve into some kind of ideophone-like system.
That certainly seems possible, too. I suspect, though, that if they evolve into anything, it will be many different linguistic systems, for many different online communities.
> Japanese is quite unusual amongst logographic writing systems in having so many readings for each character. ... Thus, I doubt that any descendant of emojis would end up like this.
Unless emoji acquire readings from a variety of languages, which seems possible, as they are already being used online in multilingual contexts. Let’s wait and see!
And yes, [Person Walking] means to go somewhere, like 去
[1] Side question: what's the accepted plural of emoji in English? "Emojis" looks wrong to me, but I suspect that's because I speak a little Japanese.
TL;DR: due to the influence of Japanese, it seems that most people who are familiar with Japanese will use its default form -i. As this loan word starts to become more prominent in the English language, the classic plural form -s should gain in popularity, such as it has been the case with ninjas or haikus.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/whats...
Yep, I prefer "emoji" given the zero plural in Japanese.
I don't think there's a consensus though. For example, Apple uses "emoji" [1], Emojipedia uses "emojis" [2], and the OED includes both [3].
[1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211808#145
[2]: https://blog.emojipedia.org/first-look-217-new-emojis-in-ios...
[3]: https://www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/389343
The japanese plural of “emoji“ would be “emoji“ (they have no plural form)
EDIT: I'm not saying it's wrong to use the native plural form, though!
So in the context of online dating, does that mean that humans are now selecting for the best compatibility between users of the same mobile platforms? :)
I can see how some apps decided to switch to their own emoji sets...
[1] https://blog.emojipedia.org/emojipedia-lookups-at-all-time-h...
Humor aside... they may reduce network bandwidth, they reduce the need for inline images, etc.
There are plenty of emojis that can be used to express dissent, skepticism or even out right anger.
Now I use sequent calculus, and make sure that every term is well-defined before I use it.
(Seriously.)
I agree with the author that when people use emoji they are leaving large parts of their intent and feelings ambiguous and can be more specific (and will force themselves to think more about what they are really trying to convey) with textual messages.
1. In Wechat "emoji" is a superset that also includes memes, where you can use any kind of image as an emoji also add other's emoji to your library (kinda like slack emoji, but bigger and more emphasized). The humor and expressiveness is immense, people use them for daily conversations instead of a quick reaction tool (well that too). Everyone's emoji lib is vastly different and it says a lot about you as a person, it's almost like a personal language.
2. The "Smile" emoji in Wechat actually means hostility [0] in younger generations ("it could mean that you just said something really dumb and the sender doesn’t want to speak to you"). Some older generations folks don't "get" it and still use them for good intent. It's always weird to see your parents send you that.
[0] https://www.scmp.com/abacus/tech/article/3029091/smiley-face...
This is where things get complicated: How can I know you're right and they're wrong? Thats no different to indirect references to things and people: so "dear leader" is understood to refer to the DPRK but in fact, contextually can be used to refer to any upward manager.
The inherent ambiguity of meaning is a problem in all communication and across both words, and shapes, it's meaning is highly contextual, and I would suggest fluid: in 5 years time this specific wechat emoji/emoticon meaning will have shifted.
"fab" probably had about 4-5 years of real currency in the 1960s. Now, its use is mostly confined to the near geriatrics or ironically. (and, to kids who watch "thunderbirds" F.A.B. probably lacks context)
In Europe a plain smile is still just that, a plain smile. Reserving it for communication with your manager or boss, is not how it is used.
The LOL or ROFL emoji is to me out of place, as you don't roll on the floor laughing while sending text messages. Laughing out loud is ok from time to time.
Still, emojis are better when they have a global meaning, e.g. the simplest interpretation possible.
It still has the innocent “this is really funny” meaning but it’s also known as the “c*%t emoji”[1] after English comedian David Baddiel noticed that anti-Semitic trolls would always sign off their messages to him with it.
He was able to turn his experiences into a stage show called “Trolls, not the dolls”[2].
1. For those that don’t know, in this context “c#%^” is a nasty but non gender specific insult that might be used for anyone being particularly unpleasant.
2. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2020/feb/10/david-baddiel-...
When talking to someone from a different culture it’s important to accept that.
Personally I find the suggestion to always assume the innocent meaning in communication to be the best policy for that reason.
How best to put this… A lot of trolls aren’t that bright.
They use the cry-laughing emoji as a sign off, as if it settles things. i.e. like it’s hilarious that anyone could think differently to them.
They’re not looking for a conversation or to be swayed in anyway.
In such cases it’s never worth arguing with them. They drag you down to their level and beat you up with experience. :)
If you don't like racism tag, then how about sexism. I'm pretty confident women use more emoji than men and I've seen plenty of female engineer's tech blog posts showing lots of emoji in their terminal prompts etc. So, assuming I'm correct, not supporting them is arguably sexist since you're effectively telling women "sorry, your preferred mode of expressing yourself is disallowed."
I get that the blog post is about not using them personally and that's of course 100% fine. But if you're judging people on if they use them or not, or if you're making systems that don't support them, please reconsider.
For example: emoji are difficult for vision impaired people to work with, and use of emoji to convey meaning reduces accessibility. You could argue that using emoji or advocating for emoji use is ableist.
Have you ever witnessed the "eww, foreign shit" thought process, or did you invent this in your head? Emojis are used all over the world that I can't imagine anyone thinking they're a "Japanese thing". Yeah they're from Japan but your imaginary racism accusation is so weird to me, if it's real, to me it would be like meeting someone who does not use flush toilets because s/he doesn't like the British.
There are technical reasons for not supporting Unicode, e.g. to prevent garbling like https://www.zalgo.org/ , but throwing things like "not supporting emojis (I'm going to mansplain to you that emojis is part of Unicode) is sexist is just... Argh! For your own sake, I suggest you stop it with the identity politics and looking to be butthurt by any perceived offense, it won't lead to a life of happiness, and you'd be the irrational one who's looking for conflict, sadly while believing you're the sane one in a holy crusade against infidels. (Ha, for the sake of analogy, it's just like Isis/Al-Qaeda think they're the righteous ones whereas the rest of the world sees them as the bad guys).
I don't know why I want to save people from themselves in an HN comment box, but here's me trying. Although I think you're already so offended that you'll totally ignore this.
It's not like it would be hard for HN to enable support. In fact they're intentionally disallowing it. I'm sure they have their reasons. I'm just pointing out that the results happen to affect women more than men
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2018/03/07/issues/whi...
Gotta love the rivalry
On the contrary, I do believe that using emojis in certain contexts are better. For instance, when you are euphoric and someone sends you a "happy-like" emoji, it makes you feel more "connected".
I guess, it's just me...
I have a 13-year old daughter, and she explained to me that my text-based smilies when converted becomes those old-school emojis. These can be interpreted in various ways by the millennials. I tried learning the new emojis and tried few times; but my daughter laughed at me, and asked me to stopped and instead she stopped using emojis with me. She texts me in full sentences while conversing with me.
I was neither in the SMS-esque shortened text bandwagon. I hated texting until iPhone came out. Still never got used to emojis.