This is a blog post from
My heavily-invested relationship with emojis is teetering a little on the side of hate, all thanks to WhatsApp’s decision to unveil its new creations . The result? Strange-looking emojis that have enraged thousands of people, all of whom have taken to venting their frustrations online on why the new ghost emoji is no longer impeccable or why the heart-eyes emoji looks just a little too keen.
Emoji just has some weird things going on. https://t.co/ljiydtzQ0E
— Gary (@GaryPendergast) November 28, 2017
This admission by me is only partly true though; I’ve actually loved emojis my whole life. I’ve found them to be incredibly OP in conversations, cheesy but effective and weirdly articulate — depending on whom you’re talking to and what you’re talking about, they can either be wholly literal or bizarrely derivative. The thing is, emojis are semantically liberal enough to mean different things to people, unlike words, which have a set meaning and can be looked up in a dictionary. It’s not the same with emojis, not everyone’s going to be perusing through Emojipedia to figure out if the woman-with-her-hand-up emoji isn’t being as sassy as you thought she was; she’s just an information desk person, who, if you think about it, is kinda sassy IRL. Or the folded-hands emoji, which is easily (mis)interpreted as two people high-fiving.
Emoji (n):
an ideogram — an object or idea represented by an image and not through alphabets or words — used in electronic communication .The word emoji is a portmanteau of the Japanese e (絵, "picture") + moji (文字, "character")
But highly subjective as they are, emojis aren’t replacing words or languages. They’ve definitely gone rogue — what with all the misinterpreting and the miscommunication especially if you’re into the whole “I texted Tinder dudes using only emojis and this is what happened” conversation — but they haven’t taken over. Because even if users agree to a uniform interpretation of an emoji, there’re still glitches and inconsistent software across platforms that exist. Simply put, a Google Nexus user sending a grinning face to an Apple iPhone user might just interpret it as a grimace and get put off, until the former clarifies and subsequent emojis ruin it for them.
And while we’re on the subject of glitches and getting put off, there’s an ongoing (never-ending) battle — the fight for emoji diversity. From whitewashed humans to characters in five different skin tones, 15 different family representations to a pair of men kissing (and a pair of women kissing) and more female avatars who run marathons, and work in construction than just dance the salsa and be a bride, (and more shoe options for women), emojis have been constantly filling spaces where words were just not enough.
Currently, there are 2,666 emojis in the Unicode Standard (as of June 2017), which are all additions to the original 176, designed by Shigetaka Kurita, for the Japanese company NTT DoCoMo’s mobile internet system, in 1999. Funnily enough, emojis were designed as a way to avoid misunderstandings between email exchanges (in those days there was a 250-character limit) because “it’s difficult to express yourself properly in so few characters”, according to Kurita.
Kurita is no longer associated with emojis; the job now belongs to the Unicode Consortium, a non-profit organisation that maintains and develops the Unicode Standard.
Just like other standards organisations, Unicode too has a membership, one that costs $18,000 annually and boasts members such as tech giants Google, Apple and Facebook, Indian States like West Bengal and Maharashtra, websites like Emojipedia and Netflix, along with individual members. Although it was set up in 1991, it was only a decade later, in 2010, that the Unicode Consortium decided to officially incorporate emojis into the Unicode Standard. How the emojis are added is where it gets interesting — the emojis that are to be added to the standard have to already be present and used in texting; meaning it can’t just be designed and submitted for approval, according to Mark Davis, the president of the Unicode Consortium.
Of course, emojis aren’t the first and only way of expressing emotions through symbols; punctuations, ASCII emoticons and slang reached the tower of babble first. But the thing with emojis is that they’re extremely useful for branding, and they’re not just employed by multinational companies — such as IKEA trying to bring their meatballs to chat, Vodafone with its (intensely annoying) zoozoo emojis on Twitter or even Modi’s own #MakeInIndia, which became the first non-U.S-based brand to get Twitter emoji.
But there’s a part of the Internet that has been quite excitedly using a secret and in-depth line of emojis, ones that are inscrutable to those who aren’t a part of it. And if you don’t do Twitch-speak , you might just be lost in those part of the woods. Since its launch in 2011 (and bought by Amazon four years later), Twitch , the popular video game streaming platform where more than 100 million gamers, streamers and viewers congregate, has its own version of emojis — emotes (think emojis on crack).
If anyone would like any of these Overwatch emotes for their twitch let me know :) I've been doodling a lot. @emonggtv@j0000mla25cm@Fahzix_@McGravyOW@shteeeeb@EeveeA_@jolsonjolson@franplayshalo@barcode_ow love you all ☺️If you know someone who needs emotes, tag them! pic.twitter.com/PZ23Ot4Hhr
— Nicole (nws) (@nweatherservice) November 30, 2017
Emotes are far more complex than emojis because they always contain an inside joke, they’re mostly created by streamers for channel branding and community-building and are more often that not, highly silly.
For example, you wouldn’t understand what the Kappa emote means if I sent it to you on text as <kappa> but on Twitch, it’d get me back an image of a salt shaker <PJSalt>. Kappa is the face of a former Justin.tv employee and was one of the first ones created when Twitch operated as Justin.tv . It’s also the most popular (since it isn’t created by a specific streamer) and associated with trolling and snickering, which is otherwise quite indecipherable with just plain text.
Which again brings us to the original purpose of emojis, which is to enhance the personality of our texts; they’re merely protein supplements to our bodies of text if you will. As the visionary Kurita — who realised that symbols were a mainstay of texting — observed, emojis “are universal, so they are useful communication tools that transcend language”. Think of it as being more friendly, because for some reason typing just “ok” seems rude or brusque in a conversation, while the addition of “ok :)” comes across as pleasant and non-confrontational. Or as cognitive linguist Vyvyan Evans wrote in his book The Emoji Code , they reflect “fundamental elements of communication; and in turn, this all shines a light on what it means to be human”.
It’s easy to argue that a smiley face emoticon means what it says unlike non-literal emojis such as an eggplant or the fingers with nail polish (which can apparently project an air of nonchalance).
But that doesn’t mean emoji is a language of its own, mostly because it doesn’t really have grammar. What it does have is the ability to help people get creative, say when they’re sexting.
You could put together a luscious peach and a slender eggplant or a banana and the chocolate donut and the intended recipient will know what’s up, as opposed to someone who isn’t quite clued in to the scene and might think you’re just being creative with the grocery list. You could also create emoji stories if you’re quite keen, but only 4.6% of typing sessions include emoji, according to Internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch. Which means almost 95% of the time we favour words to emojis. Of the 4.6%, only 15% of the time are emojis used by themselves — more proof that people still prefer solid, hard prose.
Emojis are just an informal form of language, given that they help us communicate by altering our tone over texts or by being an efficient way to message, if a laughter emoji is all I’m going use instead of typing “hahaha”. Breaking down emojis and giving them specific meanings will only make them more abstract and less universal, which is a sure-fire way to ruin something good. You’d have to probably create a code or a cipher, come up with an emoji dictionary, catalogue them, add more emojis, streamline them before you realise it’s a tedious process which requires a language that is already in use, is universal and has a bunch of texts to its name… Oh wait, it’s English.
