I kinda feel emojis have become almost useless now. I have to scroll through 5 billion emojis before I can find what I want. I think the choice to add 50 copies of every emoji with every...
I kinda feel emojis have become almost useless now. I have to scroll through 5 billion emojis before I can find what I want. I think the choice to add 50 copies of every emoji with every combination of blue and pink clothes was a mistake. And now we are adding every single combination of clothing color, height and skin color. That ends up with probably 400 combinations for each emoji. And for what purpose? We have emojis for every single combination of person in a wheelchair and the different kinds of wheel chairs but we don't have basic emojis like a penis or vagina.
These days I much prefer the user uploaded stickers that telegram has because I can have a selection of stickers I really want to be using and not 4 trillion emojis I will never use.
I'm not a big user of emoji, but one of the factors making me unwilling to learn is, as you say, the overwhelming number of options. I'm not even talking about the combinations of skin tone &...
I'm not a big user of emoji, but one of the factors making me unwilling to learn is, as you say, the overwhelming number of options. I'm not even talking about the combinations of skin tone & gender. I just look at the first page of what we used to call "smileys", and I'm lost. I don't even know what half of those mean - so I'm not motivated to scroll down the list to see more pictures I don't understand.
By the time I've scrolled through a few hundred emoji and tried to work out if any of them are relevant for what I want to say... it would have been quicker to just type it out!
I find the most annoying thing is how many emojis look alike. For example, 😀 compared to 😃 compared to 😄. Do all three really need to exist? The ambiguity is frustrating also: is 😬 happy...
one of the factors making me unwilling to learn is, as you say, the overwhelming number of options.
I find the most annoying thing is how many emojis look alike. For example, 😀 compared to 😃 compared to 😄. Do all three really need to exist? The ambiguity is frustrating also: is 😬 happy excitement or a negative reaction (which I interpret it as depends on what font is used)? Worse still is when the unicode spec and the font implementations differ...
Eh, it's a number of cultures. Unicode is supposed to be universal. Getting an actual dick or anything close would have pretty much ruled out it being adopted by countries even more conservative...
Eh, it's a number of cultures. Unicode is supposed to be universal. Getting an actual dick or anything close would have pretty much ruled out it being adopted by countries even more conservative than the US.
Then again, gay and lesbian emoji are now a thing, and I'm not aware of a huge amount of pushback against actual implementation. Unless countries like Saudi Arabia or whatever found a way to just not implement it...
The gay subtext is pretty tame and just has same-sex couples holding hands. In most cultures outside the West men holding hands with each other is fairly normal behavior among friends and doesn’t...
The gay subtext is pretty tame and just has same-sex couples holding hands. In most cultures outside the West men holding hands with each other is fairly normal behavior among friends and doesn’t read as “gay.” The LGBT rainbow flag is probably more in your face.
There's more than the gay hand holding (👭 & 👬) emoji: 👩❤️💋👩 & 👨❤️💋👨 show same-gender kissing, and with their eyes closed and the heart above their heads I think it's clear it's romantic. 👩❤️👩 &...
There's more than the gay hand holding (👭 & 👬) emoji:
👩❤️💋👩 & 👨❤️💋👨 show same-gender kissing, and with their eyes closed and the heart above their heads I think it's clear it's romantic.
👩❤️👩 & 👨❤️👨 show same-gender couples simply being together, and the heart again makes it seem romantic. They're even defined as couples, but obviously that doesn't mean anything to end-users.
👩👩👧 & 👨👨👧 and other combinations show families that have wlw and mlm relationships in theory, but there's nothing to actually define that so it's definitely ambiguous and works for non-nuclear families.
I think it would be hard for the first two to be interpreted as platonic, but I'm sure some people will anyway.
I've been told "straight" male-male kissing is a thing in Arab culture too. And apparently it's only "gay" if you're the catcher. Sexual politics gets weird once you hop cultures. You're right...
I've been told "straight" male-male kissing is a thing in Arab culture too. And apparently it's only "gay" if you're the catcher. Sexual politics gets weird once you hop cultures.
You're right that the hearts are pretty definitely romantic. I didn't notice them when I was looking through my emoji-picker for some reason.
As an external (european) observer: Do you think this corporate prudishness is predicated on the prudishness of older generations? I mean, sex sells and the corporations know it.
As an external (european) observer: Do you think this corporate prudishness is predicated on the prudishness of older generations? I mean, sex sells and the corporations know it.
You can get way closer with unicode and have been able to do so for many years. Before emojis were a thing. The eggplant is just used for comedic effect.
a freaking eggplant as the closest penis-like symbol.
You can get way closer with unicode and have been able to do so for many years. Before emojis were a thing. The eggplant is just used for comedic effect.
Here is what I see of your message. I do not know how to interpret that. I have no idea what the first symbol looks like: a mushroom, a gnome, a rock? The second symbol seems to be something...
Here is what I see of your message. I do not know how to interpret that. I have no idea what the first symbol looks like: a mushroom, a gnome, a rock? The second symbol seems to be something related to water, because it looks like droplets.
Like I've said elsewhere, emoji is a new language - and, like any other language, you have to make sure that the person you're corresponding with understands that language. If I started writing to you in Latin or French (both of which I have a smattering of knowledge of), would you understand it? More importantly, how do I know you would understand it? I have evidence that you understand English, but I don't know what other languages - Latin, French, or emoji - you understand. I should therefore stick to the language I know you understand when writing to you.
You are using a very weird emoji font that doesn't line up with any of the standards: http://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html It's an eggplant, FWIW and you may notice in the emoji...
It's an eggplant, FWIW and you may notice in the emoji chart that in most fonts it has a vaguely phallic shape. The drops of water are technically sweat droplets according to the Unicode naming convention, but when paired with the phallic shape of the eggplant the implication is the texting equivalent of doing this. (SFW-ish)
When you abstract the emoji out to the extent that your OS is, you're functionally trying to read after changing your font into dingbats. That's not doing you any favors.
Like I've said elsewhere, emoji is a new language
It's not a new language. The emoji have different meanings in different languages. In English 🍚🐰 (rice-bowl, rabbit) mean nothing in particular. In Chinese, it is shorthand for "Me Too" because the words "Me Too" and "#MeToo" don't clear their internet censors but the words for "rice" and "bunny" in Mandarin apparently sound kind of like "Me Too." So naturally the meme culture in China picked it up. They're ideograms, so the same way the H character is pronounced differently whether you're reading in Latin or Cyrillic (it sounds more like an "N" in Russian) the emoji have different meanings based on the language you speak.
What it is, is more like vocabulary or idiomatic expression. If you have a limited vocabulary, or you're not read enough into literature or pop-culture to understand allusions or references, you're going to have trouble understanding what people are saying. But that's not really the fault of the vocabulary for being rich or for the literary/cultural canon for being deep.
Tell Google! I'm using the latest version of Chrome (Version 72.0.3626.96, according to the "About" page). And... my displayed image does line up with one of those standards: it's the image shown...
You are using a very weird emoji font that doesn't line up with any of the standards:
Tell Google! I'm using the latest version of Chrome (Version 72.0.3626.96, according to the "About" page).
And... my displayed image does line up with one of those standards: it's the image shown under "Browser" next to emoji number 610. It just happens to be only half the size on my screen as the example image in that list - so that much of the detail is obscured.
the texting equivalent of doing this. (SFW-ish)
Why couldn't you just write "having sex" or "fucking"? Why did you need to go to the extra effort to track down a GIF for this? (I'm just curious. I really do not understand why people go to this effort.)
It's not a new language.
Of course it is! When a pictograph of a vegetable and water drops means "sex", that's language. That's using symbols to represent concepts other than what they literally represent.
The browser heading is just showing what you have set as your font. Because it’s not that. It’s the equivalent of a tongue-in-cheek lewd gesture. Because it’s fun and it’s funny? When the phrase...
The browser heading is just showing what you have set as your font.
Why couldn't you just write "having sex" or "fucking"?
Because it’s not that. It’s the equivalent of a tongue-in-cheek lewd gesture.
Why did you need to go to the extra effort to track down a GIF for this?
Because it’s fun and it’s funny?
When a pictograph of a vegetable and water drops means "sex"
When the phrase “the beast with two backs” also means sex that’s not a new language. That’s an English idiom.
Which is impossible because everyone has a different set of emoji that no one understands. The one in your screenshot looks nothing like the eggplant emoji on any other font.
Like I've said elsewhere, emoji is a new language - and, like any other language, you have to make sure that the person you're corresponding with understands that language.
Which is impossible because everyone has a different set of emoji that no one understands. The one in your screenshot looks nothing like the eggplant emoji on any other font.
P.S. Who here can read hieroglyphics? That's another language where pictures stand in for words - but noone could read it for centuries, until a translation (the Rosetta Stone) was found.
P.S. Who here can read hieroglyphics? That's another language where pictures stand in for words - but noone could read it for centuries, until a translation (the Rosetta Stone) was found.
Half the emoji you've chosen here aren't even rendering properly in my browser. Of the four you've used, I see two identical square boxes and two identical smiley faces. Yep, they're all alike!
Half the emoji you've chosen here aren't even rendering properly in my browser. Of the four you've used, I see two identical square boxes and two identical smiley faces. Yep, they're all alike!
So many, and yet there still isn't a fucking facepalm emoji. The emoji I and I'm sure many others would use very frequently, and it doesn't exist. But thank God we finally got ballet slippers.
So many, and yet there still isn't a fucking facepalm emoji.
The emoji I and I'm sure many others would use very frequently, and it doesn't exist. But thank God we finally got ballet slippers.
I guess I should have clarified, I meant a smiley with a facepalm, similar to the "thinking face" 🤔. I rarely use anything beyond the traditional smileys anyways.
I guess I should have clarified, I meant a smiley with a facepalm, similar to the "thinking face" 🤔.
I rarely use anything beyond the traditional smileys anyways.
Part of this might just be from lack of practice/acculturation. Most emoji are culturally or context specific, so you would never think to use them but people with those relevant jobs, from those...
Part of this might just be from lack of practice/acculturation. Most emoji are culturally or context specific, so you would never think to use them but people with those relevant jobs, from those cultures, engaged in those hobbies, etc. would. Realistically most people just rotate among a handful day-to-day and may expand to a larger stable of 20-40 or so depending on other circumstances.
With use you also just kind of get used to which keywords will bring up a commonly used emoji through your autocorrect/text-suggestion on a mobile device. I think this is something Japanese users were always used to because this is functionally how they've always typed out Kanji. (It's a bit clunkier on desktops and laptops since most people don't know how to invoke the emoji selector.)
Also some platforms, like Slack, actually have a markdown shorthand to display an emoji. You encapsulate the text in colons and if you know the right keyword it will bring up the relevant emoji. So :poo: becomes 💩.
By the time I've scrolled through a few hundred emoji and tried to work out if any of them are relevant for what I want to say... it would have been quicker to just type it out!
Well there's your problem. It's not about efficiency, it's about having fun.
There are browser extensions which add emoji shortcuts. For example ::smiley :: (without the space) will automatically insert a 😃 emoji in my browser. It's also search sensitive like an emoji...
There are browser extensions which add emoji shortcuts. For example ::smiley :: (without the space) will automatically insert a 😃 emoji in my browser.
It's also search sensitive like an emoji keyboard on a phone is, so I can type in ::hand get a big list of all the hand related emoji.
Windows and Mac I believe both have emoji selectors that can be invoked anywhere in the OS if that's more convenient for you. I think Mac is Cmd+Ctrl+Space and Windows is Win+;.
Windows and Mac I believe both have emoji selectors that can be invoked anywhere in the OS if that's more convenient for you. I think Mac is Cmd+Ctrl+Space and Windows is Win+;.
I know it is! As I wrote recently in another context, emoji is just one of a few online languages that I've decided not to learn because I don't think it's worth my while to do so. I accept that...
Part of this might just be from lack of practice/acculturation.
I know it is! As I wrote recently in another context, emoji is just one of a few online languages that I've decided not to learn because I don't think it's worth my while to do so. I accept that people who want to use this language will learn how to use it, and be adept at using it. I'm simply not one of those people.
With use you also just kind of get used to which keywords will bring up a commonly used emoji through your autocorrect/text-suggestion on a mobile device.
I don't have this feature on my phone or on my desktop computer (which I'm typing on right now).
It's not about efficiency, it's about having fun.
But it's not fun to have to search through a list of confusing and unfamiliar pictures to find a particular picture you think might exist, but don't know where it is. That's why I used to give up on the search halfway through, and why I have since given up on even starting the search.
I have been accused of being mad or rude for not using emojis in my sentences. Not for using capital letters, or insults, or curse words, or exclamation marks, or bad spelling... But for just not...
It's not about efficiency, it's about having fun.
I have been accused of being mad or rude for not using emojis in my sentences.
Not for using capital letters, or insults, or curse words, or exclamation marks, or bad spelling... But for just not using emojis.
I also took offense when someone (that knew me for a year and a half) implied I was an “emoji expert” just for being young.
Even if you know what every emoji is supposed to represent, different companies have vastly different art styles. Things have certainly gotten better since that article was written, but you still...
Even if you know what every emoji is supposed to represent, different companies have vastly different art styles. Things have certainly gotten better since that article was written, but you still have to be careful when using emojis that aren't ultra common (😂 and 🤔 ("joy" and "thinking") are certainly recognizable on any device, but 🧓 ("older person") really doesn't look old on Apple devices, appears to be an old woman on Samsung and Windows, and an old man on other devices, 👨🚀 ("man astronaut") doesn't appear to be an astronaut with Twitter emojis unless you zoom in, and 🤫 ("shushing face") looks downright creepy on Samsung devices, and these are just from a quick glance on this comparison chart, I didn't look through them all).
Edit: Off topic, but I miss Blob emojis. They were so fun, although Google really didn't do a good job of making their expressions match the Unicode spec well. I still dislike the new emojis, they seem so over the top by comparison, I'd rather use Twitter emojis.
The biggest thing here was when Apple decided the pistol emoji needs to be a water-gun while everyone else had a colt 45 looking revolver. For a while, depending on whether someone was on an Apple...
The biggest thing here was when Apple decided the pistol emoji needs to be a water-gun while everyone else had a colt 45 looking revolver. For a while, depending on whether someone was on an Apple device or not, 😐🔫 could either be interpreted as being hot and needing to cool off or like you're contemplating killing yourself. Everyone's kind of gotten on the same page with it now, but we are left without a firearm ideograph.
Or we could just use our words instead of being unnecessarily ambiguous. Maybe the ancient Egyptians had an entire written language using proper characters, which was then supplanted by a popular...
Or we could just use our words instead of being unnecessarily ambiguous. Maybe the ancient Egyptians had an entire written language using proper characters, which was then supplanted by a popular but faddish "emoji" culture that eventually replaced all the characters and words with hieroglyphics. The Rosetta stone was an attempt to translate this new fad into an unambiguous language usable in commerce. By the time they got to carving their new language in stone and writing it on scrolls and walls, the emoji language had completely taken over, and that's all we see preserved. "Ma, she sent me a scroll with Hawk, Asp, Jackal, Ra. Do you think she's mad about last night?"
Why though? This just seems like an arbitrary aesthetic standard for how people should communicate. Writing is always going to offer a limited range of subtlety and expression for a species that...
Or we could just use our words instead of being unnecessarily ambiguous.
Why though? This just seems like an arbitrary aesthetic standard for how people should communicate. Writing is always going to offer a limited range of subtlety and expression for a species that does most of its language processing near the auditory parts of the brain. This is why poetry is a skill that people practice and have varying levels of talent for rather than just a thing we do. The more tools, and the more fun, the better.
Overemphasis on language as solely a framework for communicating information unambiguously is just a really narrow and restrictive way of approaching the world, and it's a pretty culturally specific tendency in modernist strains in German/Anglo linguistic culture.
Arabic, as a counterpoint, is deliberately and willfully vague in the way meanings can be layered over words. Any time I try to have a conversation about Islam with Muslims it gets a little frustrating because no English translation ever seems to actually get the layers of meaning justice. Native Arabic speakers can have numerous variant interpretations of the same sentence, and this is made even vaguer by the fact that Koranic Arabic is different and distinct from modern conversational Arabic.
As another example, a huge amount of the Japanese sense of humor revolves around structures for making "puns" that revolve around Kanji that have double-meanings or differing connotations. Willfully making language less rich and layered is an implicit assumption that human communication is just a bloodless excerise in information transmission, as if all we do is accounting all day.
i'm skeptical that most emojis are more ambiguous than at least written words are, to be honest. words can be ambiguous in meaning, in spelling, in syntactical use, in structure, etc. you can...
Or we could just use our words instead of being unnecessarily ambiguous.
i'm skeptical that most emojis are more ambiguous than at least written words are, to be honest. words can be ambiguous in meaning, in spelling, in syntactical use, in structure, etc. you can create syntactical ambiguities with words, you can accidentally write garden-path sentences, you can confuse people with homophones or create problems in interpretation with words that have differing connotation and denotation or which to people are "subjective" despite their literal meanings. and some of those are certainly possible with emojis too, but in general, i suspect that emojis--because they are physical, pictoral depictions of something--would tend to be less ambiguous than written word because there are just not as many dimensions at play with emojis that could change the meaning as is true of words.
Maybe the ancient Egyptians had an entire written language using proper characters, which was then supplanted by a popular but faddish "emoji" culture that eventually replaced all the characters and words with hieroglyphics. ...
this whole thing is weirdly prescriptive. hieroglyphs were definitely "proper characters" (which is a meaningless phrase but which i'm guessing you're using to mean alphabet here) and actually could be used like an alphabet because they had phonetic readings (to the point where if the egyptians had wanted to, they could have simplified to a purely alphabetic system)--they just weren't, because hieroglyphs are a very multifaceted writing system that also allowed for logographic interpretation and semantic interpretation. (also, proto-writing as we currently know it to have mostly--if not always--taken the form of pictographs or logographs, so it seems pretty unlikely that some sort of alphabetic writing system preceded them and then was replaced)
I really need to remember sometimes that I'm on Tildes and not some place where levity is appreciated, or even interpreted as such. Apologies. As to my first sentence, an eggplant representing a...
I really need to remember sometimes that I'm on Tildes and not some place where levity is appreciated, or even interpreted as such. Apologies.
As to my first sentence, an eggplant representing a penis is less ambiguous than saying "penis" or "male reproductive organ?" Would we expect someone unacquainted with emoji to understand that without context? That's but one example; there are many others.
entirely dependent on what groups you're in. there are plenty of people who could understand the implication and the context of eggplant = penis is and has been very well established since emojis...
As to my first sentence, an eggplant representing a penis is less ambiguous than saying "penis" or "male reproductive organ?" Would we expect someone unacquainted with emoji to understand that without context? That's but one example; there are many others.
entirely dependent on what groups you're in. there are plenty of people who could understand the implication and the context of eggplant = penis is and has been very well established since emojis became a part of the unicode standard, so a quick google search (if even that, honestly) would dispel that particular ambiguity. in any case, people don't come with an inherent understanding of what a penis is or what reproductive systems are, either, so i don't think that's really a point against emojis so much as an example of the ambiguities of communication in general. there's no way to get around ambiguity because ambiguity is an inherent, unavoidable part of language, regardless of how you represent it.
Exactly. Interpreting the images of emoji is just as contextual and just as much based in prior learning as interpreting the 26 letters of the Roman alphabet in their various combinations. Neither...
Exactly. Interpreting the images of emoji is just as contextual and just as much based in prior learning as interpreting the 26 letters of the Roman alphabet in their various combinations. Neither is intuitive or unambiguous.
As someone who is rocking a samsung flavor of android a few versions behind where the pistol is still a six shooter (and oddly highly detailed), many combinators don't combine, and much of the...
As someone who is rocking a samsung flavor of android a few versions behind where the pistol is still a six shooter (and oddly highly detailed), many combinators don't combine, and much of the characters on this thread are rectangles, I think emojis varry in all the wrong ways.
I once got a lone eye-roll emoji 🙄 when trying to tell someone where somethong is. Let's just say it looked a lot happier in samsung's art. Then there is the atrocious 😬 and😳 and 😍.
Meanwhile, many emojis🈴🈳 represent words in certain languages that could be translated fairly well into other languages.
And then theres the fact that while emoji art is proprietary and poorly standardized, they all look the same style. Google ditched the blobs and while many emojis don't match in emotion cross-platform they are still yellow circles.
TL;DR Emoji could have been a universal language, but often fails to convey the most basic of emtions, looks boring, and is controlled by a mess of corporations and verions.
I never understood what was wrong with yellow people emoji. Sometimes when I'm trying to use an emoji that has a skin color modifier I have to waste time choosing what color I want it and whether...
I never understood what was wrong with yellow people emoji. Sometimes when I'm trying to use an emoji that has a skin color modifier I have to waste time choosing what color I want it and whether it's supposed to be my color, the color of the person I'm talking to, whether my choice could be misinterpreted as racist... I never cared about skin color in emojis in the first place. A simple yellow was ok. If people thought it was racist because yellow could represent only white people, then they should have made it blue or a similar color that can't be linked to a skin color.
Also, the flag emojis are also confusing. There are several countries that have their flag more than once (like Norway, Spain or the US) because a territory of them for some reason has the same exact flag of the country. Which makes its inclusion pointless, and furthers confusion.
On top of that, many emojis don't have clear meaning. It varies depending on whom you ask and on what platform you're seeing it (Samsung is likely the worst offender). And not just the meaning of the emoji per se, but also the presence or lack of it: what some consider to be polite, others consider rude.
It's not "wrong" per se, it's just less flexible in what you can say with it. For example, if your racist uncle starts talking about a border wall, sending him a ✊ communicates something very...
I never understood what was wrong with yellow people emoji.
It's not "wrong" per se, it's just less flexible in what you can say with it. For example, if your racist uncle starts talking about a border wall, sending him a ✊ communicates something very different from a ✊🏽.
I also never understood the need to segregate fricken emojis. One of the few things we all could share is that bright yellow smiley... That said, @NaraVara does have a good point about how the...
I also never understood the need to segregate fricken emojis. One of the few things we all could share is that bright yellow smiley... That said, @NaraVara does have a good point about how the meaning might change depending on the skin tone.
There's an Egyptian hieroglyph for penis (a few, actually) which is represented in Unicode but by some strange coincidence the three penis hieroglyphs seem to be the only ones that can't display...
emojis like a penis or vagina
There's an Egyptian hieroglyph for penis (a few, actually) which is represented in Unicode but by some strange coincidence the three penis hieroglyphs seem to be the only ones that can't display on my computer when looking at this table. (They are U+130B8 𓂸, U+130B9 𓂹, and U+130BA 𓂺).
If you want a pictorial representation of a vagina you can look to Sumerian cuneiform (and turn your head to the left) for U+122A9 𒊩 There's also a Sumerian penis U+1232B 𒌫 but it's not as straightforward (so to speak) as the Egyptian variant.
Sometimes it's rather hard to pick one when you are looking for it, but there are still nice options: Keyboard on mobile suggests an emoji if you type in the corresponding word Also there's...
Sometimes it's rather hard to pick one when you are looking for it, but there are still nice options:
Keyboard on mobile suggests an emoji if you type in the corresponding word
Also there's usually emoji search by name
Recently used emojis are typically saved in a separate list, that's useful
Finally, you could google the meaning of confusing or alike emojis and then use them confidently
My keyboard does not suggest emoji. I can not search for emoji by name because I don't know their names. What is the one with the laughing tears even called (to take just one example)? I won't...
My keyboard does not suggest emoji.
I can not search for emoji by name because I don't know their names. What is the one with the laughing tears even called (to take just one example)?
I won't have a recently-used list of emoji if I can't find the emoji to use it in the first place.
I don't want to stop and Google an emoji while I'm typing an SMS to my friend about where & when I'll meet him for dinner.
Laughing tears 😂 How it looks I just typed that and GBoard was surprisingly smart enough to suggest it. Yeah maybe not the easiest scenario but occasionally it's nice to make chat messages cute by...
I just typed that and GBoard was surprisingly smart enough to suggest it. Yeah maybe not the easiest scenario but occasionally it's nice to make chat messages cute by using suggestions for simple words. Also of course this depends on keyboard and its settings.
Thanks for that answer to my question. However, I was using that one single example to demonstrate a larger point. There are literally thousands of emoji. How am I supposed to know what they're...
Thanks for that answer to my question. However, I was using that one single example to demonstrate a larger point. There are literally thousands of emoji. How am I supposed to know what they're all called?
And, here's another point I've just realised from looking at your example. If I have to stop and type out the name of an emoji, then find it in a list of suggestions, and then select it... how is that better for me than just typing the word or phrase in the first place? It seems like a whole lot of extra effort to achieve the same outcome.
I think it depends on who you are communicating with and the context. I never used emoji in professional emails but it's become common to at least include a smiley or wink to help convey tone -...
I think it depends on who you are communicating with and the context.
I never used emoji in professional emails but it's become common to at least include a smiley or wink to help convey tone - particularly with people I don't interact with very often in person.
Emoji can be useful to convey tone outside of the stated text to apply an emotional context to the words. I think things like "LOL" or other shorthand work as well (*smile* or *wink*) depending on platform and who you're conversing with - but emoji are pretty universally "felt" because of the imagery.
I occasionally do this. But I use the old-fashioned typed versions: :) ;) :P :( [that's about my full range] As other people in this thread have pointed out, and as I've seen discussed in articles...
it's become common to at least include a smiley or wink to help convey tone
I occasionally do this. But I use the old-fashioned typed versions: :) ;) :P :( [that's about my full range]
emoji are pretty universally "felt" because of the imagery.
As other people in this thread have pointed out, and as I've seen discussed in articles elsewhere, some emoji are displayed differently in different software, to the point that the recipient sees a different message than the one you thought you were sending.
It's about not thinking in absolutes. There are hundreds of emojis but anyone can use only a few. If I specifically want a particular emoji in the text (rarely) to give it some visual style I'll...
It's about not thinking in absolutes. There are hundreds of emojis but anyone can use only a few. If I specifically want a particular emoji in the text (rarely) to give it some visual style I'll select it from recents or even search it using the search bar on the keyboard emoji panel, but in most cases they are spontaneus simple things like 🐢 or 🏠, 1 click on keyboard suggestion.
Considering we're all posting here means that we're able to read and write (maybe poorly, but still), some parts of the internet, especially India, have huge swathes of illiterates. I can...
Considering we're all posting here means that we're able to read and write (maybe poorly, but still), some parts of the internet, especially India, have huge swathes of illiterates. I can understand emoji's help them to communicate.
Also in a lot of places, from Eastern Europe to Africa, China, and India, many languages can be close enough that they're more-or-less mutually intelligible, but some key words can have...
Considering we're all posting here means that we're able to read and write (maybe poorly, but still), some parts of the internet, especially India, have huge swathes of illiterates.
Also in a lot of places, from Eastern Europe to Africa, China, and India, many languages can be close enough that they're more-or-less mutually intelligible, but some key words can have drastically different meanings. I used to run surveys and at one point a word that unambiguously meant "employee" in one language was a euphemistic term for "slave" in another. We used the same translator for both but they didn't know about this.
My phone (Galaxy 7 using the Google keyboard) lets me do a text search for emojis. Emojis even come up in the suggested words when I'm typing normally.
My phone (Galaxy 7 using the Google keyboard) lets me do a text search for emojis. Emojis even come up in the suggested words when I'm typing normally.
This seems like a UI/UX problem. By default only one emoji type should be shown (either a skin/hair combo set by preference or a default yellow). Pressing and holding on an emoji should give you a...
This seems like a UI/UX problem. By default only one emoji type should be shown (either a skin/hair combo set by preference or a default yellow). Pressing and holding on an emoji should give you a bunch of wheels/dropdowns to adjust different aspects (skin color, hair color, etc.).
Additionally there should be search by name.
IMO all hand-signs and "smilies" should be first, with a "most used" set of emoji above that.
My keyboard(anysoftkeyboard) allows me to start typing a name of an emoji after a colon so I can find them easily. It makes them easy to use. I can't believe most chat apps/keyboards don't have...
My keyboard(anysoftkeyboard) allows me to start typing a name of an emoji after a colon so I can find them easily. It makes them easy to use. I can't believe most chat apps/keyboards don't have this feature, emojis are a pain without it
Since I'm a colossal nerd and I wanted to know how it was done from a technical standpoint: the new mixed skin-tone groupings aren't distinct characters, they're ordered combinations of individual...
Since I'm a colossal nerd and I wanted to know how it was done from a technical standpoint: the new mixed skin-tone groupings aren't distinct characters, they're ordered combinations of individual person + skin tone + zero-width-joiner characters.
You can go further than that! Conjugate pilot + female + medium skin-tone = female pilot with medium skin-tone! On this path, who knows -- we might just end up with a full pictographic written...
A lot of the new emojis are mixes of old ones. The gay flag is a white flag + a rainbow emoji. They still look split for people without the latest unicode support.
A lot of the new emojis are mixes of old ones. The gay flag is a white flag + a rainbow emoji. They still look split for people without the latest unicode support.
I don't really understand what the "person" emojis are for. It seems to imply that gender is a visual thing. Like being non binary means your hair is half way between short and long and you have...
I don't really understand what the "person" emojis are for. It seems to imply that gender is a visual thing. Like being non binary means your hair is half way between short and long and you have fat lips.
To be fair, emoji are a purely visual medium, so options are kinda limited I feel. But yeah, I totally didn't get it. I looked at the chart and just though they were adding a new hairstyle or...
To be fair, emoji are a purely visual medium, so options are kinda limited I feel.
But yeah, I totally didn't get it. I looked at the chart and just though they were adding a new hairstyle or something. Now that I know, I see it, but it's far from intuitive that its supposed to be an androgynous "just a person".
Yeah, that's a good point. I think I was pleased to see a more generic "person" in part because the woman versions of various emojis are quite stereotypically feminine (conflating a particular...
Yeah, that's a good point. I think I was pleased to see a more generic "person" in part because the woman versions of various emojis are quite stereotypically feminine (conflating a particular look with gender). But I suppose adding a third option partly just reinforces the man/woman stereotypes in the older emojis...
I think it’s easy to dismiss when there’s a large swath of emojis that depict someone that looks like you. (Even if you don’t ever use them.) When you exist as someone who feels like there is no...
I think it’s easy to dismiss when there’s a large swath of emojis that depict someone that looks like you. (Even if you don’t ever use them.)
When you exist as someone who feels like there is no depiction of who you are in a set of universally used depictions of people, it can feel like you’ve been overlooked as a person.
I think this was inevitable when we moved past yellow smileys.
None of the emojis look like me, I'm a guy with long hair. I don't wear blue shirts or pink dresses. None of the emojis even have the same hair color as me. And I also don't care. If we had to...
None of the emojis look like me, I'm a guy with long hair. I don't wear blue shirts or pink dresses. None of the emojis even have the same hair color as me. And I also don't care. If we had to include everyones hair color we might as well build the sims character creator in to the emoji picker.
I mean, this is what is happening within the bounds of the protocol. I think the question is why folks have anxiety about it. I know you never said you personally have anxiety about it, but I...
If we had to include everyones hair color we might as well build the sims character creator in to the emoji picker
I mean, this is what is happening within the bounds of the protocol. I think the question is why folks have anxiety about it.
I know you never said you personally have anxiety about it, but I think there exist a lot of folks who felt erased and that these steps help them feel more included in society. Is that bad?
There was a story in my paper today about the new "period" emoji - which seems like a strange thing to have an emoji for. Mind you, I also don't see the need for emoji for a flamingo, a parachute,...
There was a story in my paper today about the new "period" emoji - which seems like a strange thing to have an emoji for. Mind you, I also don't see the need for emoji for a flamingo, a parachute, a waffle, a piece of underwear, or a Hindu temple. When would there ever be a need to send a picture of these things? I've never had a desperate need to send a picture of a yoyo or a ballet slipper.
It's more about enabling more diverse forms of communication for those who prefer pictorial communication over textual communication—now if you ask me, emoji overuse is certainly a thing,...
It's more about enabling more diverse forms of communication for those who prefer pictorial communication over textual communication—now if you ask me, emoji overuse is certainly a thing, especially amongst younger people. But I can personally see some uses for them. As a hobby, I'm a paragliding student. I can now happily reply to "What are you up to?" with "🪂 today!". It's succinct & keeps conversations interesting.
(NB: the emoji I've used in this message likely won't resolve for most people browsing on Tildes for several months).
In my personal experience, more often than not it's older people that end up abusing it instead of the younger crowd. The latter, I'd accuse of abusing voice messages instead.
emoji overuse is certainly a thing, especially amongst younger people
In my personal experience, more often than not it's older people that end up abusing it instead of the younger crowd. The latter, I'd accuse of abusing voice messages instead.
Oh you're gonna need to get used to it. As wearables become more of a thing, people are going to be typing less and talking more. The Apple Watch, for example, is pretty horrible for text input...
The latter, I'd accuse of abusing voice messages instead.
Oh you're gonna need to get used to it. As wearables become more of a thing, people are going to be typing less and talking more. The Apple Watch, for example, is pretty horrible for text input but it's a great asynchronous walkie talkie. It's also good at sending small doodles, animations, reaction gifs, and emoji. In the future it will probably do "Animoji" too. Face it, the age of text is over, the time of the pictogram has come.
Also, my wife travels internationally for work a lot so we wind up doing voice messages pretty often because it's nice to be able to hear each others' voices.
I would expect voice to text to become common in this case. My pebble had a feature to send text messages via voice input. Needed external servers though which sucks.
I would expect voice to text to become common in this case. My pebble had a feature to send text messages via voice input. Needed external servers though which sucks.
I think it will take longer for voice-to-text to get good enough than for the UX around voice messages to become smooth. Honestly, I'm not sure if voice-to-text will ever be good enough for how...
I think it will take longer for voice-to-text to get good enough than for the UX around voice messages to become smooth.
Honestly, I'm not sure if voice-to-text will ever be good enough for how people actually text. If all you're doing is dictating formal speech or giving commands it's fine. But in day-to-day casual conversation it just fails. It can't do slang very well and it can't do a lot of the creative forms of writing that people use to add layers of emphasis or emotion. This includes things like deliberate misspellings or intentionally bad grammar (e.g. I can haz cheezburger, doge memes), formatting for emphasis or emotion (e.g. ALL CAPS MEANS YELLING, aLtErNaTiNg CaPs Is ReAd In A mOcKiNg ToNe), stretching out letters to indicate exasperation (e.g. fiiiiiiine), or onomonopeia/writing out utterances that aren't real words (e.g. "ugh," "unf," "mmmm").
There's even a lot of text shorthand that means something other than the obvious. LOL doesn't mean "laughing out loud" anymore, and it's more like a texting version of the smile you give someone to acknowledge that they've said something mildly amusing. It's easy as a reflexive 3 keys to type. But saying "Reply to Billy. "El-Oh-El." Yes, send." just doesn't work at all because LOL isn't a word, it's a proxy for a communication we normally convey through body language.
Even on a more practical basis, it's completely useless if you're bilingual or speak with any kind of patois. My friend is Jamaican and his Alexa does not understand him at all. In order to issue it a command he has to completely alter how he talks. He adopts what he calls his "Here's my license and registration officer. . ." voice which is, obviously, not something he enjoys having to do just to get a Spotify playlist on.
Most people in multi-lingual households mix words, phrases, and expressions from various languages all the time, but none of these platforms can actually understand Spanglish, Chinglish, etc. It's even incapable of really understanding when you're talking about a proper noun from another language like if you try to tell someone to meet you at a French restaurant that has a French name. Ever try to get your GPS to take you to Le Pain Quotidien? It doesn't work well.
My wife speaks French, smatterings of an obscure West African language, and English. I speak Spanish, a South Indian language called Telugu, smatterings of Hindi, and English. We both know lots of random words and phrases in Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Turkish, and other languages of friends we have from other countries as well and we pepper these things into our speech all the time. And those are actual, officially recognized languages. Let's not get started on what happens to couples, and especially couples with kids, as they start to integrate family in-jokes based on random noises, baby babbling, and mispronunciations as words into how they talk to each other. Over time families functionally create an internal dialect for when they talk amongst themselves.
In light of all this, voice-to-text just feels too restrictive for how people like talking to each other to ever really work. And if you're talking to someone at a keyboard, they will have that full range of textual expression open to them that you do not, but they will expect or assume you to have the same range open to you. Your responses back will read as stilted and formal from their perspective. It just doesn't work. It constrains your scope for expression rather than opening it up because everything has to be interpreted through a machine translator. In edge cases, like when you're driving it's fine because the context can make it clear that you're communicating out of necessity. But I don't see it ever becoming the primary way people communicate.
Really? Obviously anecdotal, but I don't think I've received a voice message from anyone younger than their late 40s. It's something I associate with people my parents' age.
Really? Obviously anecdotal, but I don't think I've received a voice message from anyone younger than their late 40s. It's something I associate with people my parents' age.
I'll be using the "waffle" emoji quite a lot for people who make long rambling comments of little to no substance. Verbosity for the sake of word count is one of my pet peeves though.
I'll be using the "waffle" emoji quite a lot for people who make long rambling comments of little to no substance. Verbosity for the sake of word count is one of my pet peeves though.
I think that for people who aren't as comfortable with bodily fluids and taboo body topics, emojis like this could be very helpful. Since it's easier to say and sounds more innocent.
There was a story in my paper today about the new "period" emoji - which seems like a strange thing to have an emoji for.
I think that for people who aren't as comfortable with bodily fluids and taboo body topics, emojis like this could be very helpful. Since it's easier to say and sounds more innocent.
Whoever designed that Sari emoji has clearly never seen a sari in real life. It looks like some weird combination of a salwar and a lehenga and is not a sari at all.
Whoever designed that Sari emoji has clearly never seen a sari in real life. It looks like some weird combination of a salwar and a lehenga and is not a sari at all.
MSN used to have custom smileys/emojis. That's what apps should implement. You should be able to allow/block custom emojis from certain people. When they use them on you, you can reuse them. From...
MSN used to have custom smileys/emojis. That's what apps should implement. You should be able to allow/block custom emojis from certain people. When they use them on you, you can reuse them.
From there the most popular and/or necessary ones will propagate and become meme-like.
I kinda feel emojis have become almost useless now. I have to scroll through 5 billion emojis before I can find what I want. I think the choice to add 50 copies of every emoji with every combination of blue and pink clothes was a mistake. And now we are adding every single combination of clothing color, height and skin color. That ends up with probably 400 combinations for each emoji. And for what purpose? We have emojis for every single combination of person in a wheelchair and the different kinds of wheel chairs but we don't have basic emojis like a penis or vagina.
These days I much prefer the user uploaded stickers that telegram has because I can have a selection of stickers I really want to be using and not 4 trillion emojis I will never use.
I'm not a big user of emoji, but one of the factors making me unwilling to learn is, as you say, the overwhelming number of options. I'm not even talking about the combinations of skin tone & gender. I just look at the first page of what we used to call "smileys", and I'm lost. I don't even know what half of those mean - so I'm not motivated to scroll down the list to see more pictures I don't understand.
By the time I've scrolled through a few hundred emoji and tried to work out if any of them are relevant for what I want to say... it would have been quicker to just type it out!
I find the most annoying thing is how many emojis look alike. For example, 😀 compared to 😃 compared to 😄. Do all three really need to exist? The ambiguity is frustrating also: is 😬 happy excitement or a negative reaction (which I interpret it as depends on what font is used)? Worse still is when the unicode spec and the font implementations differ...
The ambiguity is a feature rather than a bug and should be embraced. Otherwise the world would never get naughty shorthand like: 🍆💦
It's amazing how prudish we are as a culture that people have to adopt a freaking eggplant as the closest penis-like symbol.
Eh, it's a number of cultures. Unicode is supposed to be universal. Getting an actual dick or anything close would have pretty much ruled out it being adopted by countries even more conservative than the US.
Then again, gay and lesbian emoji are now a thing, and I'm not aware of a huge amount of pushback against actual implementation. Unless countries like Saudi Arabia or whatever found a way to just not implement it...
Maybe we can do dicks next.
The gay subtext is pretty tame and just has same-sex couples holding hands. In most cultures outside the West men holding hands with each other is fairly normal behavior among friends and doesn’t read as “gay.” The LGBT rainbow flag is probably more in your face.
There's more than the gay hand holding (👭 & 👬) emoji:
👩❤️💋👩 & 👨❤️💋👨 show same-gender kissing, and with their eyes closed and the heart above their heads I think it's clear it's romantic.
👩❤️👩 & 👨❤️👨 show same-gender couples simply being together, and the heart again makes it seem romantic. They're even defined as couples, but obviously that doesn't mean anything to end-users.
👩👩👧 & 👨👨👧 and other combinations show families that have wlw and mlm relationships in theory, but there's nothing to actually define that so it's definitely ambiguous and works for non-nuclear families.
I think it would be hard for the first two to be interpreted as platonic, but I'm sure some people will anyway.
I've been told "straight" male-male kissing is a thing in Arab culture too. And apparently it's only "gay" if you're the catcher. Sexual politics gets weird once you hop cultures.
You're right that the hearts are pretty definitely romantic. I didn't notice them when I was looking through my emoji-picker for some reason.
As an external (european) observer: Do you think this corporate prudishness is predicated on the prudishness of older generations? I mean, sex sells and the corporations know it.
You can get way closer with unicode and have been able to do so for many years. Before emojis were a thing. The eggplant is just used for comedic effect.
The classic 8==D
My browser is a prude.
Here is what I see of your message. I do not know how to interpret that. I have no idea what the first symbol looks like: a mushroom, a gnome, a rock? The second symbol seems to be something related to water, because it looks like droplets.
Like I've said elsewhere, emoji is a new language - and, like any other language, you have to make sure that the person you're corresponding with understands that language. If I started writing to you in Latin or French (both of which I have a smattering of knowledge of), would you understand it? More importantly, how do I know you would understand it? I have evidence that you understand English, but I don't know what other languages - Latin, French, or emoji - you understand. I should therefore stick to the language I know you understand when writing to you.
You are using a very weird emoji font that doesn't line up with any of the standards: http://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html
It's an eggplant, FWIW and you may notice in the emoji chart that in most fonts it has a vaguely phallic shape. The drops of water are technically sweat droplets according to the Unicode naming convention, but when paired with the phallic shape of the eggplant the implication is the texting equivalent of doing this. (SFW-ish)
When you abstract the emoji out to the extent that your OS is, you're functionally trying to read after changing your font into dingbats. That's not doing you any favors.
It's not a new language. The emoji have different meanings in different languages. In English 🍚🐰 (rice-bowl, rabbit) mean nothing in particular. In Chinese, it is shorthand for "Me Too" because the words "Me Too" and "#MeToo" don't clear their internet censors but the words for "rice" and "bunny" in Mandarin apparently sound kind of like "Me Too." So naturally the meme culture in China picked it up. They're ideograms, so the same way the H character is pronounced differently whether you're reading in Latin or Cyrillic (it sounds more like an "N" in Russian) the emoji have different meanings based on the language you speak.
What it is, is more like vocabulary or idiomatic expression. If you have a limited vocabulary, or you're not read enough into literature or pop-culture to understand allusions or references, you're going to have trouble understanding what people are saying. But that's not really the fault of the vocabulary for being rich or for the literary/cultural canon for being deep.
Tell Google! I'm using the latest version of Chrome (Version 72.0.3626.96, according to the "About" page).
And... my displayed image does line up with one of those standards: it's the image shown under "Browser" next to emoji number 610. It just happens to be only half the size on my screen as the example image in that list - so that much of the detail is obscured.
Why couldn't you just write "having sex" or "fucking"? Why did you need to go to the extra effort to track down a GIF for this? (I'm just curious. I really do not understand why people go to this effort.)
Of course it is! When a pictograph of a vegetable and water drops means "sex", that's language. That's using symbols to represent concepts other than what they literally represent.
The browser heading is just showing what you have set as your font.
Because it’s not that. It’s the equivalent of a tongue-in-cheek lewd gesture.
Because it’s fun and it’s funny?
When the phrase “the beast with two backs” also means sex that’s not a new language. That’s an English idiom.
Which is impossible because everyone has a different set of emoji that no one understands. The one in your screenshot looks nothing like the eggplant emoji on any other font.
P.S. Who here can read hieroglyphics? That's another language where pictures stand in for words - but noone could read it for centuries, until a translation (the Rosetta Stone) was found.
Half the emoji you've chosen here aren't even rendering properly in my browser. Of the four you've used, I see two identical square boxes and two identical smiley faces. Yep, they're all alike!
So many, and yet there still isn't a fucking facepalm emoji.
The emoji I and I'm sure many others would use very frequently, and it doesn't exist. But thank God we finally got ballet slippers.
there is. it's encoded as
U+1F926 🤦here it is on emojipedia
I guess I should have clarified, I meant a smiley with a facepalm, similar to the "thinking face" 🤔.
I rarely use anything beyond the traditional smileys anyways.
My understanding is that their look depends on platform (WhatsApp, Facebook, Google, LG, Samsung, Apple, Microsoft...) rather than font.
Part of this might just be from lack of practice/acculturation. Most emoji are culturally or context specific, so you would never think to use them but people with those relevant jobs, from those cultures, engaged in those hobbies, etc. would. Realistically most people just rotate among a handful day-to-day and may expand to a larger stable of 20-40 or so depending on other circumstances.
With use you also just kind of get used to which keywords will bring up a commonly used emoji through your autocorrect/text-suggestion on a mobile device. I think this is something Japanese users were always used to because this is functionally how they've always typed out Kanji. (It's a bit clunkier on desktops and laptops since most people don't know how to invoke the emoji selector.)
Also some platforms, like Slack, actually have a markdown shorthand to display an emoji. You encapsulate the text in colons and if you know the right keyword it will bring up the relevant emoji. So :poo: becomes 💩.
Well there's your problem. It's not about efficiency, it's about having fun.
There are browser extensions which add emoji shortcuts. For example ::smiley :: (without the space) will automatically insert a 😃 emoji in my browser.
It's also search sensitive like an emoji keyboard on a phone is, so I can type in ::hand get a big list of all the hand related emoji.
Windows and Mac I believe both have emoji selectors that can be invoked anywhere in the OS if that's more convenient for you. I think Mac is Cmd+Ctrl+Space and Windows is Win+;.
interesting, work comp is on win7 so it doesn't have but I'll have to try that out at home
I know it is! As I wrote recently in another context, emoji is just one of a few online languages that I've decided not to learn because I don't think it's worth my while to do so. I accept that people who want to use this language will learn how to use it, and be adept at using it. I'm simply not one of those people.
I don't have this feature on my phone or on my desktop computer (which I'm typing on right now).
But it's not fun to have to search through a list of confusing and unfamiliar pictures to find a particular picture you think might exist, but don't know where it is. That's why I used to give up on the search halfway through, and why I have since given up on even starting the search.
I have been accused of being mad or rude for not using emojis in my sentences.
Not for using capital letters, or insults, or curse words, or exclamation marks, or bad spelling... But for just not using emojis.
I also took offense when someone (that knew me for a year and a half) implied I was an “emoji expert” just for being young.
TLDR: It's not fun when it's expected.
Even if you know what every emoji is supposed to represent, different companies have vastly different art styles. Things have certainly gotten better since that article was written, but you still have to be careful when using emojis that aren't ultra common (😂 and 🤔 ("joy" and "thinking") are certainly recognizable on any device, but 🧓 ("older person") really doesn't look old on Apple devices, appears to be an old woman on Samsung and Windows, and an old man on other devices, 👨🚀 ("man astronaut") doesn't appear to be an astronaut with Twitter emojis unless you zoom in, and 🤫 ("shushing face") looks downright creepy on Samsung devices, and these are just from a quick glance on this comparison chart, I didn't look through them all).
Edit: Off topic, but I miss Blob emojis. They were so fun, although Google really didn't do a good job of making their expressions match the Unicode spec well. I still dislike the new emojis, they seem so over the top by comparison, I'd rather use Twitter emojis.
The biggest thing here was when Apple decided the pistol emoji needs to be a water-gun while everyone else had a colt 45 looking revolver. For a while, depending on whether someone was on an Apple device or not, 😐🔫 could either be interpreted as being hot and needing to cool off or like you're contemplating killing yourself. Everyone's kind of gotten on the same page with it now, but we are left without a firearm ideograph.
Or we could just use our words instead of being unnecessarily ambiguous. Maybe the ancient Egyptians had an entire written language using proper characters, which was then supplanted by a popular but faddish "emoji" culture that eventually replaced all the characters and words with hieroglyphics. The Rosetta stone was an attempt to translate this new fad into an unambiguous language usable in commerce. By the time they got to carving their new language in stone and writing it on scrolls and walls, the emoji language had completely taken over, and that's all we see preserved. "Ma, she sent me a scroll with Hawk, Asp, Jackal, Ra. Do you think she's mad about last night?"
Why though? This just seems like an arbitrary aesthetic standard for how people should communicate. Writing is always going to offer a limited range of subtlety and expression for a species that does most of its language processing near the auditory parts of the brain. This is why poetry is a skill that people practice and have varying levels of talent for rather than just a thing we do. The more tools, and the more fun, the better.
Overemphasis on language as solely a framework for communicating information unambiguously is just a really narrow and restrictive way of approaching the world, and it's a pretty culturally specific tendency in modernist strains in German/Anglo linguistic culture.
Arabic, as a counterpoint, is deliberately and willfully vague in the way meanings can be layered over words. Any time I try to have a conversation about Islam with Muslims it gets a little frustrating because no English translation ever seems to actually get the layers of meaning justice. Native Arabic speakers can have numerous variant interpretations of the same sentence, and this is made even vaguer by the fact that Koranic Arabic is different and distinct from modern conversational Arabic.
As another example, a huge amount of the Japanese sense of humor revolves around structures for making "puns" that revolve around Kanji that have double-meanings or differing connotations. Willfully making language less rich and layered is an implicit assumption that human communication is just a bloodless excerise in information transmission, as if all we do is accounting all day.
i'm skeptical that most emojis are more ambiguous than at least written words are, to be honest. words can be ambiguous in meaning, in spelling, in syntactical use, in structure, etc. you can create syntactical ambiguities with words, you can accidentally write garden-path sentences, you can confuse people with homophones or create problems in interpretation with words that have differing connotation and denotation or which to people are "subjective" despite their literal meanings. and some of those are certainly possible with emojis too, but in general, i suspect that emojis--because they are physical, pictoral depictions of something--would tend to be less ambiguous than written word because there are just not as many dimensions at play with emojis that could change the meaning as is true of words.
this whole thing is weirdly prescriptive. hieroglyphs were definitely "proper characters" (which is a meaningless phrase but which i'm guessing you're using to mean alphabet here) and actually could be used like an alphabet because they had phonetic readings (to the point where if the egyptians had wanted to, they could have simplified to a purely alphabetic system)--they just weren't, because hieroglyphs are a very multifaceted writing system that also allowed for logographic interpretation and semantic interpretation. (also, proto-writing as we currently know it to have mostly--if not always--taken the form of pictographs or logographs, so it seems pretty unlikely that some sort of alphabetic writing system preceded them and then was replaced)
I really need to remember sometimes that I'm on Tildes and not some place where levity is appreciated, or even interpreted as such. Apologies.
As to my first sentence, an eggplant representing a penis is less ambiguous than saying "penis" or "male reproductive organ?" Would we expect someone unacquainted with emoji to understand that without context? That's but one example; there are many others.
entirely dependent on what groups you're in. there are plenty of people who could understand the implication and the context of eggplant = penis is and has been very well established since emojis became a part of the unicode standard, so a quick google search (if even that, honestly) would dispel that particular ambiguity. in any case, people don't come with an inherent understanding of what a penis is or what reproductive systems are, either, so i don't think that's really a point against emojis so much as an example of the ambiguities of communication in general. there's no way to get around ambiguity because ambiguity is an inherent, unavoidable part of language, regardless of how you represent it.
Exactly. Interpreting the images of emoji is just as contextual and just as much based in prior learning as interpreting the 26 letters of the Roman alphabet in their various combinations. Neither is intuitive or unambiguous.
As someone who is rocking a samsung flavor of android a few versions behind where the pistol is still a six shooter (and oddly highly detailed), many combinators don't combine, and much of the characters on this thread are rectangles, I think emojis varry in all the wrong ways.
I once got a lone eye-roll emoji 🙄 when trying to tell someone where somethong is. Let's just say it looked a lot happier in samsung's art. Then there is the atrocious 😬 and😳 and 😍.
Meanwhile, many emojis🈴🈳 represent words in certain languages that could be translated fairly well into other languages.
And then theres the fact that while emoji art is proprietary and poorly standardized, they all look the same style. Google ditched the blobs and while many emojis don't match in emotion cross-platform they are still yellow circles.
TL;DR Emoji could have been a universal language, but often fails to convey the most basic of emtions, looks boring, and is controlled by a mess of corporations and verions.
I never understood what was wrong with yellow people emoji. Sometimes when I'm trying to use an emoji that has a skin color modifier I have to waste time choosing what color I want it and whether it's supposed to be my color, the color of the person I'm talking to, whether my choice could be misinterpreted as racist... I never cared about skin color in emojis in the first place. A simple yellow was ok. If people thought it was racist because yellow could represent only white people, then they should have made it blue or a similar color that can't be linked to a skin color.
Also, the flag emojis are also confusing. There are several countries that have their flag more than once (like Norway, Spain or the US) because a territory of them for some reason has the same exact flag of the country. Which makes its inclusion pointless, and furthers confusion.
On top of that, many emojis don't have clear meaning. It varies depending on whom you ask and on what platform you're seeing it (Samsung is likely the worst offender). And not just the meaning of the emoji per se, but also the presence or lack of it: what some consider to be polite, others consider rude.
It all adds up. So I generally avoid using them.
It's not "wrong" per se, it's just less flexible in what you can say with it. For example, if your racist uncle starts talking about a border wall, sending him a ✊ communicates something very different from a ✊🏽.
I also never understood the need to segregate fricken emojis. One of the few things we all could share is that bright yellow smiley... That said, @NaraVara does have a good point about how the meaning might change depending on the skin tone.
There's an Egyptian hieroglyph for penis (a few, actually) which is represented in Unicode but by some strange coincidence the three penis hieroglyphs seem to be the only ones that can't display on my computer when looking at this table. (They are U+130B8 𓂸, U+130B9 𓂹, and U+130BA 𓂺).
If you want a pictorial representation of a vagina you can look to Sumerian cuneiform (and turn your head to the left) for U+122A9 𒊩 There's also a Sumerian penis U+1232B 𒌫 but it's not as straightforward (so to speak) as the Egyptian variant.
They all look like square boxes to me.
For folks seeing empty squares: Google has free fonts for each of those languages:
Sometimes it's rather hard to pick one when you are looking for it, but there are still nice options:
Keyboard on mobile suggests an emoji if you type in the corresponding word
Also there's usually emoji search by name
Recently used emojis are typically saved in a separate list, that's useful
Finally, you could google the meaning of confusing or alike emojis and then use them confidently
Laughing tears 😂
How it looks
I just typed that and GBoard was surprisingly smart enough to suggest it. Yeah maybe not the easiest scenario but occasionally it's nice to make chat messages cute by using suggestions for simple words. Also of course this depends on keyboard and its settings.
Thanks for that answer to my question. However, I was using that one single example to demonstrate a larger point. There are literally thousands of emoji. How am I supposed to know what they're all called?
And, here's another point I've just realised from looking at your example. If I have to stop and type out the name of an emoji, then find it in a list of suggestions, and then select it... how is that better for me than just typing the word or phrase in the first place? It seems like a whole lot of extra effort to achieve the same outcome.
I think it depends on who you are communicating with and the context.
I never used emoji in professional emails but it's become common to at least include a smiley or wink to help convey tone - particularly with people I don't interact with very often in person.
Emoji can be useful to convey tone outside of the stated text to apply an emotional context to the words. I think things like "LOL" or other shorthand work as well (
*smile*or*wink*) depending on platform and who you're conversing with - but emoji are pretty universally "felt" because of the imagery.I occasionally do this. But I use the old-fashioned typed versions: :) ;) :P :( [that's about my full range]
As other people in this thread have pointed out, and as I've seen discussed in articles elsewhere, some emoji are displayed differently in different software, to the point that the recipient sees a different message than the one you thought you were sending.
It's about not thinking in absolutes. There are hundreds of emojis but anyone can use only a few. If I specifically want a particular emoji in the text (rarely) to give it some visual style I'll select it from recents or even search it using the search bar on the keyboard emoji panel, but in most cases they are spontaneus simple things like 🐢 or 🏠, 1 click on keyboard suggestion.
Considering we're all posting here means that we're able to read and write (maybe poorly, but still), some parts of the internet, especially India, have huge swathes of illiterates. I can understand emoji's help them to communicate.
Also in a lot of places, from Eastern Europe to Africa, China, and India, many languages can be close enough that they're more-or-less mutually intelligible, but some key words can have drastically different meanings. I used to run surveys and at one point a word that unambiguously meant "employee" in one language was a euphemistic term for "slave" in another. We used the same translator for both but they didn't know about this.
My phone (Galaxy 7 using the Google keyboard) lets me do a text search for emojis. Emojis even come up in the suggested words when I'm typing normally.
This seems like a UI/UX problem. By default only one emoji type should be shown (either a skin/hair combo set by preference or a default yellow). Pressing and holding on an emoji should give you a bunch of wheels/dropdowns to adjust different aspects (skin color, hair color, etc.).
Additionally there should be search by name.
IMO all hand-signs and "smilies" should be first, with a "most used" set of emoji above that.
My keyboard(anysoftkeyboard) allows me to start typing a name of an emoji after a colon so I can find them easily. It makes them easy to use. I can't believe most chat apps/keyboards don't have this feature, emojis are a pain without it
Since I'm a colossal nerd and I wanted to know how it was done from a technical standpoint: the new mixed skin-tone groupings aren't distinct characters, they're ordered combinations of individual person + skin tone + zero-width-joiner characters.
You can go further than that! Conjugate pilot + female + medium skin-tone = female pilot with medium skin-tone!
On this path, who knows -- we might just end up with a full pictographic written language.
A lot of the new emojis are mixes of old ones. The gay flag is a white flag + a rainbow emoji. They still look split for people without the latest unicode support.
Pretty cool to have more specific disability emojis, as well as various "person" emojis (rather than man or woman).
I don't really understand what the "person" emojis are for. It seems to imply that gender is a visual thing. Like being non binary means your hair is half way between short and long and you have fat lips.
To be fair, emoji are a purely visual medium, so options are kinda limited I feel.
But yeah, I totally didn't get it. I looked at the chart and just though they were adding a new hairstyle or something. Now that I know, I see it, but it's far from intuitive that its supposed to be an androgynous "just a person".
Yeah, that's a good point. I think I was pleased to see a more generic "person" in part because the woman versions of various emojis are quite stereotypically feminine (conflating a particular look with gender). But I suppose adding a third option partly just reinforces the man/woman stereotypes in the older emojis...
I think it’s easy to dismiss when there’s a large swath of emojis that depict someone that looks like you. (Even if you don’t ever use them.)
When you exist as someone who feels like there is no depiction of who you are in a set of universally used depictions of people, it can feel like you’ve been overlooked as a person.
I think this was inevitable when we moved past yellow smileys.
None of the emojis look like me, I'm a guy with long hair. I don't wear blue shirts or pink dresses. None of the emojis even have the same hair color as me. And I also don't care. If we had to include everyones hair color we might as well build the sims character creator in to the emoji picker.
I mean, this is what is happening within the bounds of the protocol. I think the question is why folks have anxiety about it.
I know you never said you personally have anxiety about it, but I think there exist a lot of folks who felt erased and that these steps help them feel more included in society. Is that bad?
There was a story in my paper today about the new "period" emoji - which seems like a strange thing to have an emoji for. Mind you, I also don't see the need for emoji for a flamingo, a parachute, a waffle, a piece of underwear, or a Hindu temple. When would there ever be a need to send a picture of these things? I've never had a desperate need to send a picture of a yoyo or a ballet slipper.
It's more about enabling more diverse forms of communication for those who prefer pictorial communication over textual communication—now if you ask me, emoji overuse is certainly a thing, especially amongst younger people. But I can personally see some uses for them. As a hobby, I'm a paragliding student. I can now happily reply to "What are you up to?" with "🪂 today!". It's succinct & keeps conversations interesting.
(NB: the emoji I've used in this message likely won't resolve for most people browsing on Tildes for several months).
In my personal experience, more often than not it's older people that end up abusing it instead of the younger crowd. The latter, I'd accuse of abusing voice messages instead.
Oh you're gonna need to get used to it. As wearables become more of a thing, people are going to be typing less and talking more. The Apple Watch, for example, is pretty horrible for text input but it's a great asynchronous walkie talkie. It's also good at sending small doodles, animations, reaction gifs, and emoji. In the future it will probably do "Animoji" too. Face it, the age of text is over, the time of the pictogram has come.
Also, my wife travels internationally for work a lot so we wind up doing voice messages pretty often because it's nice to be able to hear each others' voices.
I would expect voice to text to become common in this case. My pebble had a feature to send text messages via voice input. Needed external servers though which sucks.
I think it will take longer for voice-to-text to get good enough than for the UX around voice messages to become smooth.
Honestly, I'm not sure if voice-to-text will ever be good enough for how people actually text. If all you're doing is dictating formal speech or giving commands it's fine. But in day-to-day casual conversation it just fails. It can't do slang very well and it can't do a lot of the creative forms of writing that people use to add layers of emphasis or emotion. This includes things like deliberate misspellings or intentionally bad grammar (e.g. I can haz cheezburger, doge memes), formatting for emphasis or emotion (e.g. ALL CAPS MEANS YELLING, aLtErNaTiNg CaPs Is ReAd In A mOcKiNg ToNe), stretching out letters to indicate exasperation (e.g. fiiiiiiine), or onomonopeia/writing out utterances that aren't real words (e.g. "ugh," "unf," "mmmm").
There's even a lot of text shorthand that means something other than the obvious. LOL doesn't mean "laughing out loud" anymore, and it's more like a texting version of the smile you give someone to acknowledge that they've said something mildly amusing. It's easy as a reflexive 3 keys to type. But saying "Reply to Billy. "El-Oh-El." Yes, send." just doesn't work at all because LOL isn't a word, it's a proxy for a communication we normally convey through body language.
Even on a more practical basis, it's completely useless if you're bilingual or speak with any kind of patois. My friend is Jamaican and his Alexa does not understand him at all. In order to issue it a command he has to completely alter how he talks. He adopts what he calls his "Here's my license and registration officer. . ." voice which is, obviously, not something he enjoys having to do just to get a Spotify playlist on.
Most people in multi-lingual households mix words, phrases, and expressions from various languages all the time, but none of these platforms can actually understand Spanglish, Chinglish, etc. It's even incapable of really understanding when you're talking about a proper noun from another language like if you try to tell someone to meet you at a French restaurant that has a French name. Ever try to get your GPS to take you to Le Pain Quotidien? It doesn't work well.
My wife speaks French, smatterings of an obscure West African language, and English. I speak Spanish, a South Indian language called Telugu, smatterings of Hindi, and English. We both know lots of random words and phrases in Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Turkish, and other languages of friends we have from other countries as well and we pepper these things into our speech all the time. And those are actual, officially recognized languages. Let's not get started on what happens to couples, and especially couples with kids, as they start to integrate family in-jokes based on random noises, baby babbling, and mispronunciations as words into how they talk to each other. Over time families functionally create an internal dialect for when they talk amongst themselves.
In light of all this, voice-to-text just feels too restrictive for how people like talking to each other to ever really work. And if you're talking to someone at a keyboard, they will have that full range of textual expression open to them that you do not, but they will expect or assume you to have the same range open to you. Your responses back will read as stilted and formal from their perspective. It just doesn't work. It constrains your scope for expression rather than opening it up because everything has to be interpreted through a machine translator. In edge cases, like when you're driving it's fine because the context can make it clear that you're communicating out of necessity. But I don't see it ever becoming the primary way people communicate.
Really? Obviously anecdotal, but I don't think I've received a voice message from anyone younger than their late 40s. It's something I associate with people my parents' age.
I'll be using the "waffle" emoji quite a lot for people who make long rambling comments of little to no substance. Verbosity for the sake of word count is one of my pet peeves though.
I guess there's so many ways you can say "I'm on my period", it's probably just easier to send an emoji.
I think that for people who aren't as comfortable with bodily fluids and taboo body topics, emojis like this could be very helpful. Since it's easier to say and sounds more innocent.
A Belgian waffle, but no stroopwafel! HERESY!
Whoever designed that Sari emoji has clearly never seen a sari in real life. It looks like some weird combination of a salwar and a lehenga and is not a sari at all.
Finally, a stick of butter emoji!
Now we wait for them to realize that there are way too many emotes and try to reduce the clutter.
Once it’s in Unicode it’s not coming out. (And most of Unicode’s code space is unassigned, so there’s no motivation to remove anything. For now…)
MSN used to have custom smileys/emojis. That's what apps should implement. You should be able to allow/block custom emojis from certain people. When they use them on you, you can reuse them.
From there the most popular and/or necessary ones will propagate and become meme-like.