I don't need to experiment with not using emoji. I am old enough to have a working life before they existed. In those days all online discussions became a huge argument very quickly. Passive-aggressive memos with bosses cc'ed in flew about constantly. In-person meetings were hastily convened on a regular basis to sort things out. Usually all that needed sorted out was a stupid misunderstanding, and the root cause was usually a misreading of tone followed by an emotional overreaction somewhere in the chain of emails.
My 18-year old son, who I mostly communicate through text messages, went cold on me recently. I assumed he was angry about something so I called him. No, he had decided to give up using 'childish' emoji. I asked him to reconsider.
I am firmly of the opinion that emoji are incredibly useful and that normal speech is full of emotion and playfulness that hastily written text cannot convey. You should therefore be using them in your workplace. If you don't use emoji you will be misunderstood. No matter how well written your prose is the recipients may only have time to skim-read it.
Using emoji are, in my opinion, very 'professional'.
Some food for thought, the younger segment of the online neurodivergent community has come up with a solution to this problem: "tone indicators"[1]. They are semifrequently seen in the art spaces I hang out in. If you've seen "/s" on Reddit, you've probably seen a tone indicator.
both terms were coined after UTF-8 and after people started to replace the character strings like :) with pictures.
emojis are technically the UTF-8 style emoticons, so you do have a point that i shouldn't call ascii style emoticons this, but its really a redundant distinction in my opinion. Especially as the term emoticon also applies to emojis/picture representations of ascii-style emoticons.
Unicode indeed has an emoticon block (referring to emojis with facial expression) but the term actually predates the very UTF-8 itself going back to early 80s. Emoji also predates its Unicode introduction originating from Japan in late 90s.
what source do you have that the term 'emoticon' was coined in the 80th?
As far as I know, the term was coined in the 90th. Please take note that i've - from the start, talked about the term, not the usage of punctuation to show faces
Wow, I never knew there was a whole list of these! I love this, they are very clear. Usually searching through emoji I'll pick one purely based on how it looks and not realizing it really has a different meaning than I intended.
For instance, I've used the 'sad-but-relieved-face'[1] emoji before but probably just to convey slightly sad and never to include the relieved part. In fact, I didn't know until I just went searching for emojis just now that it was meant to convey relief.
You don't need emojis for that. Just good ol' emoticons.
I recognize what you mean about the office memos due to trivial misunderstandings (particularly tone misunderstandings) escalating. In my experience, almost all of them are the cases of someone erring on the side of seriousness. Myself, I mitigate that up front by judicious use of two emoticons: ":)" and ";)". The very act of using either of them, independent of the choice and context, already marks the whole sentence/paragraph/conversation as friendly.
Adding trees and rocketships and popcorns? Especially to either replace the exact word, or put it next to that word? What's the point?
(Ok, I'll admit I found two other emojis useful at work: thumbs-up and facepalm.)
Setting a surprised pikachu icon conveys way more meaning than anything I can think of in ascii form. All the Slack workspace I’ve seen had specific custom images that helped bring nuances in discussions that went a long way to give an angle to interpret your thoughts.
Only to people who're in on it, who know what it means.
I'm young enough that I 'should' love emoji, Snapchat, etc. and certainly did love Pokemon (Blue & Yellow on Gameboy Colour), but I would have no idea what you meant by a 'surprised pikachu icon'.
I think using something that might not be understood (and the recipient being left to guess worse things than you do mean) is worse than nothing at all.
And what would you do in a spoken conversation then anyway? 'Hang on, I need to send you an emoji'?
I think we already do that with words anyway. If someone replies to you with something along the lines of “my sweet summer child”, “tu quoque” or “hey dawg…” you’ll need to know the context to get what they mean.
Verbally your voice tone will bring 1000% more context.
IMO the “you need to know it” part is exactly why it works on many levels, as unfriendly it can be to new people from outside. I would say that’s part of speaking idiomatically.
Most companies have a culture of weird acronyms and phrases that are totally meaningless outside the context of that culture. It's expected that you won't understand normal discourse for the first couple weeks. I think emoji-usage is a subset of this linguistic phenomenon.
At my company, we have thousands of emoji-reacts (including surprised-pikachu), that probably have widely-divergent meanings to their users. Some people have seen them outside of the company before, and use them / seek them out knowingly. Those that don't pick it up pretty quickly.
You're right that the meaning is better when you're "in on it", but I think you might be overrating how big of a deal it is to become "in on it", and underrating it's utility as a form of expression, especially emotional expression, in a medium that normally lacks visual expression / body language / intonation.
Yes, but I can't think of an example where a rocketship emoji would fit in a conversation (except for marketing language, which I consider to be hostile).
Emojis directly corresponding to emotions make more sense: a facepalm emoji expresses the same thing that an actual gesture would.
Unless you've been hired as an astronaut, I fail to see how a rocketship emoji would communicate anything relevant. An exclamation mark (or more than one) is a time-honored way of expressing excitement.
Consider that you failing to see these things is a "you" thing, not a "people are doing it wrong" thing.
Emojis are part of today's written culture because they're so trivially included alongside things being written today. You are fighting a battle that has long ended: they're a feature of communication now. Just like older ASCII emojis, and various other even older nonstandard-standards of comms.
And replying with an exclamation mark, something I've done myself many times, is incredibly ambiguous and not the best example you could come up with here :)
Also, you're kinda talking past each other here in terms of emojis in a message vs emojis as reaction.
I'm a consultant, I work with all kinds of people. The number one skill required is communication, and learning to communicate with new teams, new people, new companies. All of them have different ways to communicate. Many of them use emojis, not all, but I also work with lots of different countries.
I also do quite a bit of work in the gaming community which has its own custom emoji culture, a different beast altogether.
People communicate outside of work; a heart to a loved one, my dad using a car emoji in the family group chat to indicate he is driving home from work, a thumbs-up when someone in a friend group suggest going to a movie
Maybe I'm too old, but in all these cases, the exclamation mark is doing all of the job of expressing elation, and adding a rocketship icon would be redundant.
Ok, fair, I guess you're trying to bait me into admitting that emojis are a way of expressing fundamentally different shades of emotions that are possible with ASCII.
I suppose this may be right, some people may be already thinking in emojis, the way some of my generation learned to think in emoticons.
Are you under the impression that emojis "mean" the same for everyone? We kinda invented words to specify the meaning; emojis are a horrible step back.
Again, with the arrogance and the implication that persons using emojis are dumb and/or uneducated.
Yes, images are ambiguous. Just as text is limited and constraining. There's a reason we say "a picture is worth one thousand words", and it's not because the creators of said quote didn't have a thesaurus at hand.
That is such a terrible sentence, because it's barely ever true. Most pictures, without a context, are utterly meaningless; go check a Facebook stream where people just barf images without any context. None of them mean anything, let alone a thousand words.
Fun fact, one publisher AMA I read reported that a picture is literally worth one thousand words, ie.
(per word rate) * 1000 = estimated price of an illustration.
Of course pictures don't mean anything without context, but then, neither do words. It's much easier to understand a complicated layout with a map than with a description of all the possible exits, for example, and neither provides much information if you don't know what room/building is being described.
Or, you could say, "agreed upon semantic meaning" is a work in progress.
Except Kanji and other logographic systems since the hieroglyphs don't actually picture a thing directly, so there's no confusion between what's the "agreed upon" meaning and what the image represents at face value.
> since the hieroglyphs don't actually picture a thing directly
Sometimes they do. 龍 is one of my favorites, and it originates as a picture of a dragon - body and legs on the right, head (立) and whiskers (月) on the left.
That's a fair point I suppose. Kanji started as pictographic too. It's just really strange to me that anyone would choose to add such a complicated feature to language use that they didn't inherit from a time before syllabaries and alphabets.
If you think words don't have this problem, you should read into Jacques Derrida's concept of différance. This may be more apparent in emojis since they're relatively newer.
I mean a more picture-like emoticon is more neutral in my opinion. And it can be supporting/cheering, e.g. when doing a complicated change or deployment. Probably there are better alternatives though. ;) can be interpreted as condescending, so I rather avoid that with work topics. :) Is generally friendly though, I think.
I've had a coworker use <grin> instead of smiley faces. I thought that was a pretty effective way to show emotions while still having a professional looking email.
Yes, back in my BBSing days, using <grin> or (more commonly) <g> was popular before smilies such as :) took off. And when they did, we just called them smilies, even frowny face ones, not emoticons.
I agree that emojis (or emoticons or kaomojis) are incredibly helpful in text conversation. But I think there is another thing going on in the article, and that's using emojis to replace text, instead of enhancing it. Sending just a heart or a thumbs up instead of a "thank you :)" or "this made my day!". A practice that helps cutting the noise in busy social network posts, but is much less expressive and meaningful. An emoticon is like a smile: it's much more meaningful when combined with words.
Of course, "meaningful" can be used in other ways; words often have more than one meaning.
On the other hand, the commenter used "meaningful" and "expressive" in parallel, which suggests they already understood them to be distinct. So it's not clear what you're objecting to.
Hm, I don't know. From my experience, communication without emoji of any kind works perfectly fine in a workplace and so far, I don't think I've ever received work-related communication that contained it. After all, it's not exactly difficult to write in a rational and neutral way what you want to say. If people want to interpret some kind of not-explicitely-said something into a written text, that's pretty much on them then. If anything, I consider emoji to be rather unprofessional, same as excessive usage of punctuation marks. In the days when forums were still doing fine, anyone who wrote a sentence ending with "!!!!!" would usually get a response like: "Satzzeichen sind keine Rudeltiere!" or some more eloquent but mean one which I can't remember.
Anyway, in the end, it might just be a cultural (German) thing but it seems to work since I've never seen an issue arise from the lack of emoji, smileys etc.
> My 18-year old son, who I mostly communicate through text messages, went cold on me recently. I assumed he was angry about something so I called him. No, he had decided to give up using 'childish' emoji. I asked him to reconsider.
It's very common for me to place a smiley at the end of a message. Text or image, doesn't really matter, but it serves as a marker of "how I'm feeling about this message". Most common are some variety of :p and :/ .
I think they serve a useful purpose, but I do get self-conscious about including them in every message. :/
>It's very common for me to place a smiley at the end of a message.
I know a couple who would always put a smiley face at the end of the message unless they were mad. It didn't make sense to me at the time, but I can see how it would work well.
Years ago I saw a texting app which would take a selfie with every message and add it as a very small image next to the text. The intent was to attach some visible emotion to every message in a way that pure text can't accomplish.
I intentionally end a lot of sentences with an exclamation point because I have seen this problem and don't want to be perceived this way by colleagues. But in a short message, it can be half (or more) of the message! I probably end up coming off like a dog who's so excited he can't sit long enough to earn a treat!
> I am old enough to have a working life before they existed.
Are you talking about emojis or smilies too? Because emoticons were probably invented by Nabokov (one of the best russian writers of all time) around 1969 [0]:
> I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile — some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket, which I would now like to trace in reply to your question.
My solution is to not write hasty "professional" emails. I take my time to craft my messages for conciseness, and re-read and re-write them before sending to remove any ambiguity. I do use emojis in text messages, and other non-professional communication. To me, professional communication requires a little more time and effort, but that's what makes it professional.
That one's also part of German. They have umlauts for A, O, and U. Though as far as I can tell, the German Ä is just a variant of "E".
The other two are their own vowels, and they used to be rendered in English as "oe" and "ue". It's not clear to me why we decided that it was better to write "Gödel" as "Godel" than as "Goedel".
For the same reason telling jokes is frowned upon, and why casual projects posted to Show HN often get criticized for being trivial. Hacker News considers itself serious business to a fault.
And no, the Unicode ones won't work, the code strips them out. You'll have plain text and be happy with it.
> For the same reason telling jokes is frowned upon, and why casual projects posted to Show HN often get criticized for being trivial. Hacker News considers itself serious business to a fault.
It's not exactly that. HN has plenty of humor (and lord knows it's the easiest way to rack up karma, if you care about such things) - you just have to put some effort into it.
"Show HN" attracts criticism mostly because the opposite of that would be just patting someone on their back, which is boring and benefits neither the submission author, nor the community. Good, constructive criticism gives everyone a chance to improve. Bad criticism tends to get down-voted and flagged pretty quickly.
> And no, the Unicode ones won't work, the code strips them out. You'll have plain text and be happy with it.
Unicode does work. Just not all of it. If you think some characters currently filtered out should be available on HN, you can always ask 'dang to remove them from the filter (via mail, hn@ycombinator.com). I've done that in the past.
That said, it's important to remember why many Unicode characters are blocked: it's because of spam. There's a large population of users who want to use Unicode characters as cheap visual tricks, to make the titles or comments stand out more. This goes directly against the kind of culture that makes HN the place it is.
> There's a large population of users who want to use Unicode characters as cheap visual tricks, to make the titles or comments stand out more.
Also as a means of trying to fool keyword-based anti-spam filters. I've seen entire words spelled out in alternate Unicode characters that look like the characters of the actual word, but are not the actual letters they look like visually. Computers, being inherently "dumb machines" totally overlook such words if they're not actively blocked at some level by the filter (easy way is to block the actual characters these spammers use, but of course this can then cause problems for those who actually use those characters properly; Yay, spammers. Ruining the Internet for everyone).
HN is the kind of place where, in response to a joke, the squares will inundate you with links to research papers about how most people find themselves funny but in really they are not, without a hint of irony.
I mean, what about all the research on how some people who chronically do not find anything funny?
At first it got me thinking, but this is a place where horrible humans like Peter Thiel are worshipped, so yeah - it's not me.
It tells a lot about the "orange website." Most people complaining about HN outside this forum are also members of this forum - almost no one else cares. The guidelines don't allow complaining about or criticizing the community here, and the mods tend to take any such criticisms personally, even if they agree with them. Certain cultural pathologies are left to fester in the name of maintaining civility and high "signal to noise," so people have to vent their frustrations with this place elsewhere.
And let's be fair, HN complains obsessively about the rest of the web, and especially social media, all the time. It just can't get as good as it gives.
Yeah, it does tell a lot about the "orange website". Strongly reinforces my decision to stay here, and not use Twitter.
In one of my episodes of obsessive procrastination, I once used Twitter search to list tweets mentioning the phrase "orange site", and spent a couple hours reading through ~3 years of history. Most of the critical ones reflect very badly on the people tweeting.
> The guidelines don't allow complaining about or criticizing the community here,
> and the mods tend to take any such criticisms personally, even if they agree with them.
Citation needed. Can't think of a single example.
> Certain cultural pathologies are left to fester in the name of maintaining civility and high "signal to noise," so people have to vent their frustrations with this place elsewhere.
Personal opinion, and this may be a controversial view, but I feel that pathologies mostly start when civility and high SNR are being abandoned.
Is there such a guideline ? If there is, I've never noticed it. I've certainly seen people address HN on HN quite a few times, I might even have done it myself, but I was always under the impression that it was fine insofar as you're acting sensible.
Anyhow, if people get so invested into HN that they feel the need to vent about it, the problem might not be HN.
No specific guideline, it's more the effect of various guidelines being interpreted by a defensive culture.
We can't accuse someone of not having read the article, despite two of the biggest problems this community has regarding the quality of conversation being people only commenting on the title, and people using the title as a springboard for whatever polemic it triggers in them.
We can't be "snarky" or "sneer" about the community. Any direct criticism of the community comes off as snark.
Meta commentary is frowned upon for being unsubstantive. All criticism of the community is meta commentary by definition.
>Anyhow, if people get so invested into HN that they feel the need to vent about it, the problem might not be HN.
And then again, the problem might be HN. Getting invested in a community and being disappointed in its faults isn't a problem.
The 7-38-55 rule is a useful way to think about communication even if it isn’t strictly accurate. My own feeling is that the percentages are more evenly divided between words, tone and body language. I think emoji go a long way towards making up for the failings of text only conversation but we’d be even better off if we could capture the tone as well.
One problem with emojis is the inconsistency of the faces across devices and services. Not to mention people have different interpretations. Tone indicators are much more clear in my opinion.
Nevertheless I expect to see business / formal language to use more and more emoji in the coming years. It’ll happen slowly, but surely.
I would argue that smileys are useful for the reasons you stated, but do you really need to use the emoji icons instead of building your own with regular characters such as :) ?
I don't want to just jump in with some negative comment here but let's start with being honest - 95% of this post is about the history of emojis, how to use them, and what they mean. Which is a helluva lot of information about emojis for an article that concludes that they enjoyed NOT using emojis, and doesn't really have any substantive conclusion to make about things or any follow up.
However, for anyone who does happen to be interested in the history of emoji, Keith Houston's Shady Characters blog has a ten(!) part series [0] on them.
Without unnecessary information about the history of emojis, this would have been the entire article:
--------------
When was the last time you went a day without using any emoji? How about a week? In March 2021, I went through a fun self-imposed experiment: no emoji for 2 weeks. Not on social media, not in private messages, not even as Slack or Discord reactions. No emoticon either: the goal was to communicate without illustrations, only with words. I did a semi-rigorous (a.k.a. half-assed) diary study, taking notes on my feelings and behaviour.
Here’s what I wanted to find out:
How does the lack of emoji affect my conversations with others?
Will other aspects of my interactions be affected?
My hypothesis was “I will somehow want to compensate for the lack of emoji.”
So, what did happen when I stopped using emojis?
On the first day of my experiment, I was already worrying that I wasn’t warm enough, or wasn’t conveying my reactions well enough. On the second day, I missed using emojis. It hadn’t even been 48 hours, but the good stuff comes when you push through, so I kept at it. On the third day, finally, I started feeling good about this. I wrote:
“This is actually cool, I don't know if I want to get back to emojis. Maybe I just needed to get the habit out of my system.”
No shit, Sherlock.
In the first few days, I did have to edit emojis out of my messages, as I was using them reflexively. During this experiment, I pondered about the importance of emojis to convey banter, being concerned that without them, I’d simply come across as mean.
In the end, I found myself adding a lot of exclamation marks, "hahaha", and writing more sentences to better communicate my mood. The need to better convey my messages forced me to have a deeper understanding what I was trying to communicate in the first place. Sometimes, a heart means “I love you”, “I miss you”, “I hope you’ll feel better soon”, “I love what you’re saying”, etc. Was I expecting my interlocutors to guess the exact meaning? I’m happy that it forced me to phrase my thoughts, look deeper into them, better identify and express them. I had to write "Thank you" or "That's great!" instead of adding a reaction emoji under a Slack message, Twitter DM, or Discord message, and I like to believe that those words carried more value than one more thumbs up added to the pile.
Ever since my 2-week experiment ended, and I started operating with emojis again, I’ve been paying more attention to what I write. I prefer using emoji on top of self-sufficient phrasing. I want to make sure that my messages are clear enough without emoji, and only then might I add one, spending it on expendable flair rather than something meaning is reliant on.
I wholeheartedly invite you to carry out this experiment for yourself. Who knows what fantastic feeling or intriguing behaviour you might uncover?
And that’s all it needed to be to convey the same message, despite the author talking about needing to watch their words more carefully during the experiment.
I actually went a step further and stopped using words, because it turns out people also interpret them differently. Some people, for example, cannot read sarcasm.
Now I use sequent calculus, and make sure that every term is well-defined before I use it.
Be sure to include the considerations that went into standardizing the spellings to make sure that we can't express dangerous ideas with doubleplusungood words.
...After reading the first half of your comment, I thought you were serious. Only after the second half did it finally dawn on me that you were probably being sarcastic. Seriously.
Good job reading the entire comment and using context to suss out the likely meaning and intent behind the words. That's actually a pretty rare skill these days in many parts of the Internet. ;)
The main use I have for emoji is in the emoji-reactions in the Slack that we have to use at my current company.
The emoji-reaction this way is a kludge for a lower-priority asynchronous response that doesn't interrupt people with a notification (like a message would). They'll see the response when they return to the view.
The thing that makes me sad about Slack emoji reactions is that across Windows and Mac users, Slack defaults to a different emoji for the check mark. In particular the default check mark that Windows users will be invited to use, is hard to see if the receiver is using a dark theme on their device.
Note: this was a few months ago, my company switched to a different platform so maybe it's been fixed in the meantime
> that doesn't interrupt people with a notification [...] The emoji-reaction this way is a kludge for a lower-priority asynchronous response
Isn't the entire premiss of Slack that it is asynchronous? That it does not interrupt the flow in the way a phonecall or tap-on-shoulder does?
What went wrong that now the senders of communication have to -again- tread carefully, be aware of the receivers status and work, employ kludges, so not to interrupt co-workers?
My partner didn't grow up "on the internet" like I did, and her ability to convey or perceive emotional cues that exist in the internet chat zeitgeist has been really interesting to me.
Just one really small example that I think will be a good demonstration:
Ending a sentence without a full stop is normal
Ending a sentence with a full stop feels cold or aggressive.
Ending a sentence with an ellipsis has a negative connotation depending on the context...
Some of you will be thinking "Uh, that's not true." Which it's almost definitely not true for everyone, but those emotions were ubiquitously conveyed in chat networks I was part of while I was growing up and there are dozens if not hundreds of uniquely text based emotional nuance that grew out of the need to be more expressive in chat/sms/text based messages.
I'd love to see a study on it since I feel it may well explain a lot of miscommunications on the internet. If you assume the person you're talking to knows the 'rules' then you could be totally misunderstanding them. My partner finishes all her sentences with a full stop and on more than one occasion I've had to remind myself not to read into it, it's just that she's not 'from the internet'.
It seems like we rapidly went from "Please use proper grammar online" -> "OK, proper grammar isn't required" -> "Proper grammar is rude."
We now have ended up at a point where there are different grammatic rules online vs. IRL, and not everybody agrees on them. That is OK, we don't all agree on the Oxford comma either. But I find it absurd for people to judge the grammatic style of others online - we don't even all speak the same language, how can we possibly all agree on proper punctuation?
> That is OK, we don't all agree on the Oxford comma either. But I find it absurd for people to judge the grammatic style of others online - we don't even all speak the same language, how can we possibly all agree on proper punctuation?
Oxford comma master race FTW!
Seriously though, you're absolutely correct. The only valid time I can think of where one should probably consistently expect to have their grammar, punctuation, or spelling judged "harshly" should be in places/situation where those things are and have always been considered important. The writing profession springs instantly to mind, but other examples might be professional correspondence, documentation, scientific publication, etc. Places where language tends to be more "formalized".
I think this is fundamental to human linguistics in general, not unique to written text. People communicate differently in different places, even when speaking the same language or just using non-verbal queues. The only real difference on the internet is that it's less clear which culture you're in or if you're even in a different culture.
Two examples from real life:
There was an article on here recently about why Russians don't smile. In their culture a smile signals laughter not happiness/friendliness. So when you smile at a stranger there to be friendly they think you're laughing at them.
Swearing. I come from Scotland where the words fuck and cunt are considered normal language by many (not all). If a friend told me an unlikely story I would exclaim 'fuck off' in disbelief and they would understand that I was disbelieving/amused. But If I reacted that way to most Americans I know they'd take offence thinking I was angry at them.
The way that emojis and grammar are used differently across the internet is fundamental to how human groups create their own linguistic protocols. Trying to use emojis less rather than just spreading understanding of differences is a mistake in my opinion.
What you say here exactly illustrates why if one does not immediately grasp the intent of someone's words, they should not take immediate offense, but rather "dig deeper". Don't understand why someone said something they said the way they said it? Ask them. Easiest way to clarify things is to request more information to work with. :)
It's really not that serious a topic but here's a serious answer anyway: you can have full stops anywhere you want, it's really up to the reader to not read into what you've written. Not everyone uses full stops that way and it mostly applies to chat anyway. I use full stops at the end of HN comments, but not at the end of instant messengers or chat rooms for example.
It is. I've had a co-worker once call it "a full stop of hate", and it clicked with me immediately, and then every person to which I mentioned this phrase immediately know what I meant. I believe it did grow organically.
So, in the version I know and that seems to be Internet universal, it applies to IM messaging only. You don't start sentences in uppercase, and a full stop at the end of a message is interpreted as strong, negative emphasis.
Similarly, ending an IM message with ellipsis is expressing disappointment. It can be productively used if it's obvious that the disappointment is not with your interlocutor (e.g. "these politicians..."). I personally know a (non-tech-savvy, so not a nerd bias) person who walked up to her coworker and very sternly asked she stops sending her messages ending with ellipsis, because it reads as if she constantly had some grudge.
It's not. Only a very small percentage (even a fraction maybe) of the people I communicate with have ever even mentioned it. It's like a thing that a few people are trying to make a thing even though it's not really a thing.
No one is saying it's a universal law, but it's definitely a thing that happens, and it's down to the individuals. I know people who if they use a full stop it's intentional and it's to make sure I realise they're dead serious. I also have my partner, who puts a full stop on everything because that's correct grammar.
This is a decades old phenomenon by the way, no one is "trying to make it a thing". This isn't a twitter hot topic, it's just a nuance of online communication that's been around since at least IRC's hey-days. Some people read into it, some don't.
There's a sad small group of people who just want any excuse to be instantly offended at anyone and everyone about any little thing, and they're always makin' up weird stuff like this (or buyin' into some other small sad person's made up thing). I've come to realize the only options are to ignore them or call them out on it, depending on the given situation.
As Gretchen McCulloch put it: the message bubble _is_ the full stop. It did happen organically, and it _is_ an alarming event when someone who usually doesn't use full stops in chat suddenly decides to use one.
Tom Scott made a video on that [0], which references Gretchen's book - Because Internet [1]
I'm not really thrilled with that definition or line of thinking because it leads to a horrible habit that annoys me no end. The habit of using the sending of a single line of text in lieu of a "full stop" (period). This leads to thirty dingdingding notifications as the person sending seems to be incapable of putting a complete stream of thought into a proper paragraph with sentences in a single message. Just type out a complete thought before hitting "Send", please. I don't really want thirty related individual sentences arriving one after another separately.
I've disabled all notifications, save for blinking LED. So if I happen to look at my phone - I will see that there are some unread notifications, but other than that - no sounds, no vibrations, I don't need this distraction in my life.
I've only enabled them for a couple of important contacts. Now I can even tell from whom the message is, just by the sound of the notification.
From what I remember, sentiment analysis should reveal the cold and aggressive association to date at least to early 2000s ICQ communication in the Czech-speaking 7-15y/o cohort.
The first time I can remember having to actively remind myself that people who grew up without internet use periods differently was about 2012.
Even some of us who grew up with Internet still grew up in a time (and place) where some English teachers were "grammar nazis" and drilled punctuation, spelling, and grammar into us to the point of it becoming habit.
It’s the equivalent of pretending that the old, widely-understood “OK” sign has something to do with white supremacy. The idea is to see if you can get people to believe it, and enjoy the panic that results.
What a ridiculous leap of logic. This is just an observation I've made about how people as individuals interpret things on the internet, intuited from a long history of chatting online. I'm not implying there is some rulebook for internet etiquette. Some people read into it, some people don't. Is it really so hard to imagine that? Some people think the power of your handshake says all there is to know about you, some people think smiling without showing your teeth is rude. Humans are weird, it's just a nuance of text chat some people write and read and some people don't.
Ending your sentence with an ellipsis feels so passive agressive to me for some reason.
Then occasionally I'll get a mail from someone who seems to use them as their default punctuation... For every single sentence... I have no idea why they do it... Do they think it gives them character...?
Older pre-internet generations used the ellipsis to separate thoughts or to insert a pause, whereas today we typically do this with a line break and possibly an entirely separate message. The result is sometimes you end up talking to older folks who come across as annoyed or rude and it's really not the case.
I have a few coworkers who do this and I have to remind myself that it's just how they type. I speak to them in person so I know it's not that they're mad at me or something like that.
To be honest, I actually would prefer the ellipses over some other conversations. I have coworkers who have to type out every single thought as a separate message. E.g. I received a similar set of messages below, that should have been a single message and not 5. If they had just paused for 3 seconds to think about their speech, it would have been a single message. Instead I get a notification icon bouncing a dozen times and firing off alerts like it's an emergency.
person_a: oh did you see the sign?
person_a: it was in the conference room
person_a: says something about turning off the lights
person_a: after meetings though
person_a: i thought the lights turned off automatically?
"Ok" is probably one of the best examples for how subtle changes in punctuation and spelling can convey extremely different sentiments with the same word. Language is at least as much about subtext as text, yet we only ever formally learn to pay attention to the latter outside fairly specific university level courses.
The fact that MS Teams includes this as one of the only 5 reactions you can send to a message is... frustrating. It isn't the only issue with Teams by far but, please, MS, Discord already did it right.
> Ending a sentence with a full stop feels cold or aggressive.
> Ending a sentence with an ellipsis has a negative connotation depending on the context...
It has to be considered that some of us who grew up in a world where "proper" punctuation and grammar were drilled into us in school as "important skills" may find these things to be natural and reflexive. Even folks like myself, lucky enough to have grown up with Internet access since before it was even called "Internet" often had the English teacher in school who would severely dock your grade on bad punctuation, grammar, or spelling. This of course has directly (and probably permanently) affected how we write in all aspects of written communication, online or otherwise.
Something I found interesting in the emoji usages in China:
1. In Wechat "emoji" is a superset that also includes memes, where you can use any kind of image as an emoji also add other's emoji to your library (kinda like slack emoji, but bigger and more emphasized). The humor and expressiveness is immense, people use them for daily conversations instead of a quick reaction tool (well that too). Everyone's emoji lib is vastly different and it says a lot about you as a person, it's almost like a personal language.
2. The "Smile" emoji in Wechat actually means hostility [0] in younger generations ("it could mean that you just said something really dumb and the sender doesn’t want to speak to you"). Some older generations folks don't "get" it and still use them for good intent. It's always weird to see your parents send you that.
Re (2) you misread - it's the "waving hand" emoji which can mean a bad reaction to something dumb. The "plain smile" emoji is rarely used with friends, in favour of laughter-focused images, which I don't think is unique to Wechat.
Perhaps not unique to Wechat, but still a cultural thing.
In Europe a plain smile is still just that, a plain smile. Reserving it for communication with your manager or boss, is not how it is used.
The LOL or ROFL emoji is to me out of place, as you don't roll on the floor laughing while sending text messages.
Laughing out loud is ok from time to time.
Still, emojis are better when they have a global meaning, e.g. the simplest interpretation possible.
Yep, in the UK for example the crying laughing emoji has mixed meaning depending on context.
It still has the innocent “this is really funny” meaning but it’s also known as the “c*%t emoji”[1] after English comedian David Baddiel noticed that anti-Semitic trolls would always sign off their messages to him with it.
He was able to turn his experiences into a stage show called “Trolls, not the dolls”[2].
1. For those that don’t know, in this context “c#%^” is a nasty but non gender specific insult that might be used for anyone being particularly unpleasant.
I'd say the absolute majority of crying laughing emojis I've seen on Twitter are either used by trolls (usually to ridicule statements without having to actually engage with them directly) or as a seemingly meaningless filler or sign-off in extremely hostile replies. It effectively being used in the place of an insult would explain the latter use.
A lot of things may have a different meaning depending on the context, not only words or text: even face expressions. You sometimes need to know the person to understand what they truly meant.
> Re (2) you misread - it's the "waving hand" emoji which can mean a bad reaction to something dumb.
This is where things get complicated: How can I know you're right and they're wrong? Thats no different to indirect references to things and people: so "dear leader" is understood to refer to the DPRK but in fact, contextually can be used to refer to any upward manager.
The inherent ambiguity of meaning is a problem in all communication and across both words, and shapes, it's meaning is highly contextual, and I would suggest fluid: in 5 years time this specific wechat emoji/emoticon meaning will have shifted.
"fab" probably had about 4-5 years of real currency in the 1960s. Now, its use is mostly confined to the near geriatrics or ironically. (and, to kids who watch "thunderbirds" F.A.B. probably lacks context)
"Dear leader" is a really good example of how you can get yourself into awkward situations if you're not aware of certain historic precedents. Another example: in Germany, nobody would call their boss "mein Führer", although "Führer" is the literal translation of "leader"...
Regarding #1, SameTime (the instant chat part of Lotus Notes) allowed you to add any still image or gif as an emoji. Definitely something I missed when we moved to a different platform.
I hate this so much. Facebook Messenger does this too, in fact almost every app does. They've banned the old style smileys altogether -- there's no possible way to send a message containing one -- and it really bothers me.
If I type punctuation, I want the punctuation, if I wanted the emoji I would have typed the damn emoji. I can't believe anyone thought altering people's messages without their consent was a good idea.
All of these, and various other combinations, are pretty old -in internet time, I guess-. They are usually known as "upright emoticons" [0], as opposed to "sideways emoticons".
^_^ gets abbreviated to ^^ and that's how you get it to be a smile.
Hip youngster here. ^^'s meaning as a smiley face comes from East Asian emoticons (somewhere like Japan or Korea, I'm not sure), where it's pretty much always represented a sort of laughing smiley face like you see in anime-style drawings sometimes -- like a short version of (＠＾◡＾). People also still use it to mean "the thing above this message", though.
The easiest way to differentiate it it to use a different number of carets for the "thing above this message" meaning. I like to use one caret for each message, so like if I was referring to the comment directly above mine it'd be ^ and for three messages up it'd be ^^^. You can also use context and position; usually I expect emoticons to appear at the end of a sentence while ^^^ appears at the start.
I have enough trouble interpreting the facial expressions of the real-time humans who I am conversing with, whose immediate emotional response to what I or they are saying is meaningful and important to me and which inform my own social behavior.
Now you want to shrink that whole set of social cues down to a handful of pixels, with loads of cultural and meta-cultural interpretation built in, and also give respondents as much time as they want to choose some tragically and perhaps intentionally vague icon to reply with that I’m then supposed to make sense of?
No. Already had that with words, thanks. Fuck emojis.
Red cheeks with wide eyes and an “o” mouth means one thing, while virtually the same thing but with a purple forehead instead of the red cheeks means something entirely different? Congratulations, you’ve reified my middle school experience into a goddamned tamagotchi and I hate it.
I’m not going to discuss the eggplant. Or the star or the bus or the shoe, or the juice box or the helicopter or the five (presumably) alcoholic drinks I’ve just scrolled through. Or how they only show up as suggestions while texting after you have already typed the word they symbolize and how that adds nothing to the conversation except a visual stumbling block, or how these things have NOTHING to do with emotions anymore. (Eggplant is the outlier here; even I know it’s never really used as an eggplant. And I’m angry that it can also be classified within the set of emojis that are encompassed by my first and final statement.)
The word Emoji makes it sound to an English speaker like it should have something to do with emotions (like emoticon does), but that is pure coincidence: it just means 'picture character' in Japanese (see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji)
While it is a coincidence that e+moji sounds like emotion, that is their purpose: to communicate emotions. And it is the origin of emoticons which preceded them.
Please have an even more xenophobic, imperialistic take on this. Go right ahead.
Seriously, you maybe might want to consider the western world has been forcing american/latin standards on cultures which need far more than those to communicate, considering them second class citizens and killing some of the more peculiar / original languages because they're "not worth supporting". (= Not enough eyeballs for the ads you'd be printing)
Now you have the cojones to complain about Japanese communication features seeping into the west? Fucking PLEASE.
"Xenophobic"? "Imperialistic"? What has "xenophobia" or "imperialism" have to do with historically observed practicality of types of scripts?
> you maybe might want to consider the western world has been forcing american/latin standards on cultures which need far more than those to communicate
No, I might not. For starters I'm neither American nor Latin (whatever that you imagine to be). And second, historically, almost every civilization that had a realistic option to do so got rid of ideograms and logograms, because of their sheer impracticality, especially after the invention of movable type. Hieroglyphs went from ideograms and logograms to phonograms (see this very text). Cuneiform went from ideograms and logograms to phonograms (see Ugaritic). Some civilizations like Japanese found themselves in a cul-de-sac because of how a former adoption of a logographic script changed their language (for example with onyomi in case of Japanese) but that doesn't mean that they didn't realize the advantages of phonetic writing and haven't at least tried (onnade in the Heian period, romaji in the Meiji period).
I learned to read when I was three or four years old. In retrospect, there is no way in hell that I would have preferred growing up in a place where you become fully literate (and able to read the kinds of technical texts that I was reading by the age of ten) in your very late adolescence. So for obvious reasons I do not prefer having to re-learn reading ten times as many symbols as I need to just to be able to read some small amount of texts of ephemeral value, or having to find out how to write hundreds of symbols on my QWERTY keyboard that hasn't hampered my communication in any way so far.
> killing some of the more peculiar / original languages because they're "not worth supporting"
If you believe this to be a "western" phenomenon, then I have bad news for you -- it's universal. Sad but true.
Are you arguing that it should be the national policy of a Western government, say Norway to pass laws to enforce its companies to honour every language/script on earth?
If not, can you - precisely - explain what changes you would like to see in (say) Switzerland and swiss products with respect to the San/Khoi of Botswana?
Without emoji, understanding written communication in most languages requires knowledge of two to three dozen of symbols. With emojis suddenly you need hundreds. We invented alphabets for a very good reason.
Weird take. Alphabets let you sound words out but does nothing to help you understand. Ideograms let you understand without knowing how it sounds. Perfectly good tradeoff IMO.
Maybe I'm reading it wrong but you seem to be suggesting ideograms as some sort of international written language (as opposed to proto-writing) facilitating full literary communication. I'm not aware of any successful attempt in this area. Whatever you manage to communicate with proto-writing will be extremely limited, lacking any sort of sentence structure, grammatical elements (subject vs object etc.), tenses etc., hence it will need to be complemented with regular text, and at that point you might as well just spell out your thoughts in writing. There's a reason why we use what basically amounts to proto-writing only to communicate extremely simple thoughts (warning signs, road signage etc.).
People of all nations can come up with stupid ideas. In this case it was the Japanese. The possible connection to their writing system is immediately obvious. Still doesn't warrant your overreacting and jumping to conclusions.
Did you think once before you wrote that hateful comment to ask yourself "is this a good idea"? Or "how might this affect people who are Japanese who read this?"
I have a similar opinion. I see emoji use, especially excessive emoji use as a indication of someone who cannot adequately express themselves using normal speech.
If you are seriously worried about interpretation of your comments then it is worth learning to write clearly and unambiguously. Adding an ill defined emoji is not a solution.
I love the core set of smiley face emoji, but skip most of the rest because they’re either too hard to find or too easy to misunderstand.
I’d be interested in a comparison between emoji & a character-based language like Chinese or a hieroglyphic language like ancient Egyptian… Any good articles out there on that topic? As an amateur observer of languages, it seems like the purpose & grammar of the emoji set isn’t well enough defined. Maybe some of the emoji are adjectives & should only appear once a verb or noun emoji is picked… Maybe “watermelon” should be a compound of “water” and “melon”…
Are there any notable emoji keyboard experiments out there? I wonder if anyone has tried organizing emoji like a Chinese keyboard (which I have seen & used, but may misunderstand since I don’t read Chinese).
> I’d be interested in a comparison between emoji & a character-based language like Chinese or a hieroglyphic language like ancient Egyptian…
I don’t know of any articles, but from what I know of the subject there is no comparison. Chinese and Egyptian writing systems both have the capability to represent any word or sentence in their respective languages. They do this using a combination of pictograms, ideograms and phonetic symbols. (Though the exact structure differs between writing systems: Chinese tends to combine these components into one character, while Egyptian tends to keep them more separate.) By contrast, emojis can only represent a very limited number of words, and are always pictograms or ideograms.
Of course, there’s nothing stopping you from turning emoji into a complete writing system, and inventing a language and grammar around it. But emojis as they are used today do not constitute a complete writing system.
Ever since emoji became popular worldwide, I’ve been wondering if they will become the basis for new international written languages—languages that convey complex meanings using productive grammar.
In written Chinese and Japanese, the order of ideographs—which is what emoji are—can change the meaning. In Japanese, for example, 足下 means “near one’s feet; nearby” while 下足 means “footwear”; 行先 means “destination” while 先行 means “preceding.” The readings vary depending on the combination as well; the four combinations above are pronounced ashimoto, gesoku, yukisaki, and senkō (as well as sakiyuki), respectively.
Some ideographs, like 有 “to possess,” function in multicharacter combinations as verbs, while others, like 人 “person,” function as nouns.
I'm wondering if, over time, similar grammars might emerge with emoji. For example, the combination [OK Hand] [Grinning Face with Sweat] might acquire a different meaning from [Grinning Face with Sweat] [OK Hand]. Certain emoji, like, say, [Person Walking], might come to function as verbs.
If such new written languages do emerge, they are likely to be specific to particular online communities. Looking through comments on Instagram for posts with the hashtags #crochet or #hanggliding, for example, I notice posts like [1] and [2], in which the comments are in several different languages. Perhaps partly to aid understanding across linguistic barriers, many comments have emoji appended to them, and some comments are emoji only. As near as I can tell, the order in which emoji are used in those comments doesn’t have any grammatical significance. But perhaps, somewhere on the Internet, emoji grammars are in the process of emerging.
> In written Chinese and Japanese, the order of ideographs—which is what emoji are—can change the meaning. In Japanese, for example, 足下 means “near one’s feet; nearby” while 下足 means “footwear”; 行先 means “destination” while 先行 means “preceding.” The readings vary depending on the combination as well; the four combinations above are pronounced ashimoto, gesoku, yukisaki, and senkō (as well as sakiyuki), respectively.
It’s worth remembering here that Japanese is quite unusual amongst logographic writing systems in having so many readings for each character. My understanding is that many characters were loaned multiple times from different stages of Chinese, as well as being given separate Japanese readings; also there are many irregular spellings, which I believe are quite unusual in logographies. (In some ways it’s as bad as English spelling rules.) Thus, I doubt that any descendant of emojis would end up like this.
> Some ideographs, like 有 “to possess,” function in multicharacter combinations as verbs, while others, like 人 “person,” function as nouns.
I’m not quite sure what you mean here… could you give an example please?
> If such new written languages do emerge, they are likely to be specific to particular online communities. Looking through comments on Instagram for posts with the hashtags #crochet or #hanggliding, for example, I notice posts like [1] and [2], in which the comments are in several different languages. Perhaps partly to aid understanding across linguistic barriers, many comments have emoji appended to them, and some comments are emoji only.
These examples are interesting. They don’t remind me of logographies at all, but rather of something quite different, namely ideophones: ‘A vivid representation of an idea in sound’ (Doke 1935). Like ideophones, the emojis in these examples are sentence-peripheral, act grammatically and semantically as modifiers, and are highly phonologically/orthographically distinct from the rest of the text. If anything, I suspect emojis would most likely evolve into some kind of ideophone-like system. (I personally think Mark Rosenfelder’s uɣoso [https://www.zompist.com/mars/modern-hanying.html#Implants] are a particularly good attempt at projecting this into the future.)
有線 <to possess> + <line; wire> “wired” (as in “wired Internet connection”)
Here are a couple of examples where the verb-like character 有 is preceded by an adverb-like character:
共有 <together> + <to possess> “joint ownership”
現有 <presently> + <to possess> “existing; current”
Many of these combinations, and the patterns by which they are formed, originated in Chinese, which is why many have a Verb + Object order. Chinese is a verb-medial, or SVO, language, while Japanese is SOV.
The grammar that influences the formation of these combinations (called jukugo in Japanese) is productive, in the sense that new combinations can be formed and used based on the same rules, but it is not as productive as the grammar of sentence formation. Most of the jukugo that one encounters in writing and, especially, in speech are fixed vocabulary items and are treated as words, not as phrases or sentences. Their etymology, however, is usually clear in writing and aids in their understanding; that is one advantage of ideographs, and it also makes it easier to create neologisms when writing. In speech, because many characters are pronounced the same, it is more difficult to use novel combinations and still be understood.
> If anything, I suspect emojis would most likely evolve into some kind of ideophone-like system.
That certainly seems possible, too. I suspect, though, that if they evolve into anything, it will be many different linguistic systems, for many different online communities.
> Japanese is quite unusual amongst logographic writing systems in having so many readings for each character. ... Thus, I doubt that any descendant of emojis would end up like this.
Unless emoji acquire readings from a variety of languages, which seems possible, as they are already being used online in multilingual contexts. Let’s wait and see!
I don't have good examples for you but yes, in text messages I've enjoyed trying to talk with friends in emojis-only mode. It's a great exercise for how much you can assume about people you're close to (read each others minds, finish each others sentences etc)
And yes, [Person Walking] means to go somewhere, like 去
That sounds like fun! It will be interesting to see if emoji-only modes also come into use as a lingua franca among people without a shared conventional language.
Sure, but in that case you’d need to have some sort of convention for what each combination represents, and at that point you’ve basically invented a whole new writing system based on emoji. As I said previously:
> Of course, there’s nothing stopping you from turning emoji into a complete writing system, and inventing a language and grammar around it. But emojis as they are used today do not constitute a complete writing system.
In Egyptian hieroglyphs, the equivalent of saying "smoke" would be using a smile, an open mouth and an ok sign to indicate the sounds "sm - oh - ok." Rather than, for instance, showing a picture of a cigarette.
IIRC it would actually have those phonetic components plus a picture of a cigarette or some other semantic determiner. I’m not sure if many Egyptian words were written purely phonetically, though I’m hardly an expert on this topic.
[EDIT: Just checked Loprieno’s Egyptian grammar, which says on the topic: ‘While some words of common use … are written only phonologically, i.e. only with a combination of consonantal signs … many items of the basic vocabulary of Egyptian are expressed by semagrams which indicate their own semantic meaning. They do this iconically (by reproducing the object itself), through rebus (by portraying an entity whose name displays a similar phonological structure), or symbolically (by depicting an item metaphorically or metonymically associated with the object)’.]
Yeah, it would be most likely have a determinative symbol showing a mouth, hand or person to indicate the action — less likely to have the action itself (a person smoking a cigarette or a cigarette itself).
Emojis are fine in text messages and IM/Slack. I don't think its a good idea to use Emojis in technical documentation, terminal cli apps, package managers (I'm looking at you npm), long form articles, PRs and code reviews, etc. I just find them distracting since they stand out strongly in a block of text - eyes instantly gravitate to colorful emojis in a rather smooth flow of text.
> I don't think its a good idea to use Emojis in technical documentation, terminal cli apps, package managers (I'm looking at you npm), long form articles, PRs and code reviews, etc.
Completely agree. I also find emoji in commit messages [1] to be far more ambiguous than their text equivalents.
Not sure if this shows my age, but emojis are problematic because the perceived intent change with age and context.
One trivial example being the basic laughing smiley. For me who integrated them in my nervous system when all of them had noses, they convey a humorous undertone.
So "you are kind ;)" would read as "you are kind -- nah, just kidding!". I must pause when reading them to re-program myself not to see them sarcastically because I know most people don't mean it that way. Almost every kind of happy emoji seems to be a universal way of showing good intentions. It wasn't any easier when they crept into professional communications but here we are.
To be fair to emoji, all language changes with context. Just look at the differences between, say, UK English and US English. Is someone who's 'pissed' angry or drunk?
I thought emojis were cheesy for a long time. I had a boss who had better people skills than me (not in tech) and she recommended I start using them. She said my emails come across as very serious and sometimes the tone she knows I have when talking is lost. She felt emojis softened everything and made it more casual.
Damn if she wasn't right. Often I write something I need to say, then realize it could be interpreted as mean or aggressive rather than funny and casual like I intended. Cue the emoji
Emojis in email in a business context? Maybe I'm just too old, or maybe it's because I don't work at some dreadful valley startup, but anyone at my company using emoji in a work email would probably get treated like a child and not taken seriously.
I'm not being hostile, I'm being descriptive of the business culture I know. I can't think of anywhere I've ever worked where you wouldn't be looked down on for using emoji in an email. This post is the first I've ever heard of such a thing being acceptable practice.
It really isn't. It's just the culture of business in my experience. Most offices would look down on someone who wore shorts and a T-shirt to work too. I guess there is a very different culture in some of the places some of you people are working.
I honestly don't recall if it is against policy, and I've never witnessed a case where it has come up, but I wouldn't say it is "allowed". I'd say the same thing about emoji use really. Email is business related correspondence and a certain amount of professionalism is expected.
Reading about how they have carefully designed the pictures to prevent people from communicating certain things, it reminds me of the language in Orwell's 1984 which was a simplistic and limited language designed to make it impossible to dissent.
And as a general advantage emoji isn't trying to replace words. Nobody is (as far as I know) required to use emoji. People can pick and choose when they want them.
The point is that it's a political choice to give people the ability to communicate through emojis while removing it from others (e.g. the gun example).
OTOH its a dictionary of ideograms that gets extended every year in a fairly democratic way: anyone can suggest or propose an emoji, which is quite different than the English Oxford Dictionary.
What did I say? I was just saying they literally tried to prevent you from saying specific things with the designs of the icons, and made the connection. I didn't say they weren't fun.
If you mention 1984 at all today, the anti-1984 police will come and complain that you'd dare compare anything in modern society to the dystopia in the book, even though I wasn't implying there was any repression. To me it's just an interesting similarity.
Part of this article touches on why I don't use emoji[1] - I don't know what they will look to the recipient most of the time. At least with emoticons/kaomoji, I have a decent idea. In most cases, it probably doesn't matter, but I can see it causing a miscommunication in some circumstances.
[1] Side question: what's the accepted plural of emoji in English? "Emojis" looks wrong to me, but I suspect that's because I speak a little Japanese.
If a word is borrowed from another language and becomes common place, you can use the plural form of your language. Do you say “5 pizzas“ or “5 pizze“? A notable exception are Latin words, e.g. index -> indices (if you want oto sound well educated).
The japanese plural of “emoji“ would be “emoji“ (they have no plural form)
EDIT: I'm not saying it's wrong to use the native plural form, though!
English has several nouns that don't change in their plural form: fish, sheep, aircraft, species, etc. Often this is because the originating language had no special plural form. I would therefore say that "emoji" is the correct pluralization of "emoji" in english.
TL;DR: due to the influence of Japanese, it seems that most people who are familiar with Japanese will use its default form -i. As this loan word starts to become more prominent in the English language, the classic plural form -s should gain in popularity, such as it has been the case with ninjas or haikus.
I wonder if this this is a generational thing or what other factors are at play: My peer group and I might use the occasional smiley, but it is exceeding rare that I would use any emoji for anything. I also don't see many emojis in messages to me.
I'm sure it's a generational thing. The only place I actually see a lot of emoji use is stuff reposted on Reddit, usually corporate twitter accounts and MLM marketeers.
My old man opinion is that you should probably reconsider as I believe our online arguing has gone way down since we started using emoji in the workplace. Emoji are a useful tool to prevent misunderstanding. Tone, especially aggression, is difficult to express in short text form and so much of short business-oriented messaging looks curt and aggressive.
The "misunderstanding" part is interesting to me. I've found I don't recognize what most emoji are. If I'm lucky, the site or app has some helpful alt text when I hover over the picture. In my very informal survey, I've asked others what an emoji means and I almost never get the same answer. I suppose the answers are at least in the same general category (or maybe tone?), but I often wonder how clearly both parties really understand what the other is saying. For this reason, I just stick with emoticons as the middle-ground.
My old man opinion is that there is no point discussing with people who are using emoji because they are inadequately able to express themselves using words. I have found they are also likely to take offense and act irrationally when words are the forced medium.
Normal communication has probably 1000x the bandwidth of text communication. Any extra bandwidth you can add and not overdo, for written communication, is useful.
I use emojis, maybe one every 500 words or so, and they do offer added value.
So it's strange that I already don't use emojis? Sometimes I will write "haha" or ":)" in chats, and that's about it. That was all I needed when I was in my 20s, and I see no need to change that in my 30s. It probably helps that I don't have social media, except HN and occasionally Reddit.
I didn't know this made me an outlier. Whenever someone uses a lot of emojis, I assume they are young, or wanting to seem young.
I never understood Emojis beyond the text-based smilies. I'm the one who disables "Convert my text smiley to icons" in the WordPress preferences every time I install one, ever since it was introduced.
I have a 13-year old daughter, and she explained to me that my text-based smilies when converted becomes those old-school emojis. These can be interpreted in various ways by the millennials. I tried learning the new emojis and tried few times; but my daughter laughed at me, and asked me to stopped and instead she stopped using emojis with me. She texts me in full sentences while conversing with me.
I was neither in the SMS-esque shortened text bandwagon. I hated texting until iPhone came out. Still never got used to emojis.
In some casual/private Discord channels I frequent, there's usually a couple emojis that gets used a lot, that on its own have none or extremely ambiguous meaning.
For most of them, I find it almost impossible to describe the meaning in words, yet at the same time everyone understands and acknowledges that it is not superfluous / that it conveys something.
We talked about these emojis and the best description we could come up with was that these are filler emojis. The primary purpose is to de-escalate the seriousness tone of a message, which by default is pretty serious for text-based messages.
Think about how a message may come up as rude if it ends with a period (.) and without, then add another level after that; this is what the filler emoji does.
Aside from the seriousness de-escalation, we think it also helps with the tempo/pace of the conversation, similar to how in verbal conversation you pause/leave a gap when talking, as a cue for when other people can respond. The filler emoji here is that pause.
To (outside) observers unable to understand/confused by the meaning of the (singular) filler emoji, this can easily be seen as devolving the language, but I'd argue that it actually conveys something very complex extremely concisely with one emoji.
Emojis solve the problem of texting being inefficient at the expense of ceding a lot of the expressiveness to someone else. Suddenly committees are deciding what you mean. Turns out that for a lot of people, thats fine.
Very different, in fact. Yes, language is socially and culturally determined, but it is incredibly organic and expressive. A small counsel of people deciding which emotions can be expressed, and how, is entirely different.
1984 taught us the dangers of a limited and/or artificially created vocabulary. Are the lessons not the same today?
People impute alternate meanings to words all the time. Such as "nasty" being flipped to meaning "cool". There's nothing constraining people from using emojis to mean things different from what they are defined to be.
For example, the wallstreetbets subreddit has their own local meanings for various icons.
Note that all alphabets started out as emojis. The vocabulary was, of course, very limited, and the emojis gradually got shortened, simplified, and turned into a sound, then stringing the sounds together meant a rich set of words could be formed. Did you know that the letter 'A' was originally a picture of a bull's head?
We need a committee for the English Language to come up with new words that express common phenomena for which we don't currently have words. Like, for instance, the action of searching one's self for keys and phone before changing locations. Or a word for people who stare at their phone too often in social situations.
The current letters weren't engineered to remove the ability to say something, as with emojis.
There have been political changes to dictionary entries, but most languages have many dictionaries and nobody can actually force you to change meanings or not use words you want to use.
With Unicode, there's a single global entity that decides everything.
One thing I really dislike is the aesthetics of the Apple emoji. One could say "then don't use it", but so many sites and apps are shipping an entire emoji set. With the exception of Facebook and Twitter who have made their own brand of emoji, a lot of apps are just shipping Google or Microsoft or Apple's and instead of matching your system, it completely clashes and is a waste of bandwidth. If you're on Linux, it's a total dice roll which their design team should be the 'default'.
> Apple announced that it was going to replace its realistic gun emoji by a water gun emoji. Immediately afterwards, Microsoft took the opposite stance and changed its gun emoji from a toy to a genuine-looking one, arguing that it was better aligned with the Unicode standard and with users’ expectation of a gun emoji.
It’s so weird the author doesn’t give any perspective on how the experiment was received on the other side. We have this one-sided evaluation of how they feel it could be perceived by the recipient, and no actual check on that.
Makes it pretty hard to make any jugement on the whole thing.
An interesting trend is happening in Telegram (maybe not only there). Telegram on all platforms natively supports so called "stickers", basically a picture which replaces emoji. They are custom made by users and client supports seamless adding new packs to your library with a single click. Once a good pack is introduced first time in a chat it spreads like a virus if it is interesting enough. And bad packs are silently ignored.
So, these sticker packs have effectively replaced any emoji other than generic smiley, because emojis today are simply bad. Looking at them it feels like a kindergarten book. Stickers on the other hand can be anything you want - sarcastic, offensive, insulting, dumb etc.
I am so glad that I witness stickers as addition and not replacement. I get where you are coming from, and I have a huge collection on telegram for every possible moment (and thausands of sexual ones I barely use)
But the majority of moji I see is gladly still emoji.
Edit:// however check Bitmoji to see how far we've gone with stickers already :)
It doesn't sit well with me that the Unicode consortium decides which emojis to approve based on moral grounds or possible consequences of their use. I have stopped using emojis because I don't want to contribute in legitimizing that.
The "ethics" in tech are often wrt the actions if tech companies - in this case it is the actions (communications) of tech customers (or users) and the attempts to restrict certain types of communication.
Any given service could ban (real) gun emojis, but when the standard excludes it, all services must effectively operate without it.
There is place for ethical discussions in tech, but international standards are not the appropiate place or tool to push your push your vision of ethics.
I recently found that having emoji fonts breaks my terminal. This bug will probably eventually be fixed so I didn't think too hard before removing emoji from my system. I don't use them myself and personally have not noticed them ever being used with a decent signal-to-noise ratio. I have come to associate them with snide or political remarks on Twitter and clickbait articles.
I agree with the author that when people use emoji they are leaving large parts of their intent and feelings ambiguous and can be more specific (and will force themselves to think more about what they are really trying to convey) with textual messages.
Emoji helped make most apps and websites support Unicode, which is cool. I'd rather use the little unique emoticons most forums had though. They were fun and could be personalized for each community.
I write stories to teach a foreign language. Using emojis alongside the text is very helpful to help convey the meaning.
That made me realize there is a property of the emojis that is rarely mentioned : they are a fairly extensive free set of consistently designed characters. And they may be the only one out there.
The title hits home, strongly... I have rarely used emojis (let alone I don't have any social media profile, plus only conversate through mails with few people). One thing I realized is the use of emojis from the other side evokes a sense of "I don't want to see emojis...". I don't know why, but I just feel that emojis kinda make me feel that the conversation isn't "deep"; it doesn't convey the actual emotions... In hindsight, I also feel a few-word replies are often disengaging. Probably it's just me. But it's been years I haven't used emojis. I don't even have the urge to use it or see it.
On the contrary, I do believe that using emojis in certain contexts are better. For instance, when you are euphoric and someone sends you a "happy-like" emoji, it makes you feel more "connected".
I’m 27, went through a later part of my teen years with an iPhone. I’m not big on emojis and neither are most of my friends. Every once in a while I might use it to add a “feeling” but most of the time, I just don’t use it.
I don't like Emojis too much, but I'm fascinated by Unicode, it representations, and how creatively people abuse it, to create faces for example. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
With the rising use of emojis I think the humanity is coming full circle: almost every writing system started with a hieroglyphs, then dumping it for the obvious advantages of alphabetical writing. But now, the pendulum swings in the other direction, and a lot of communications become effectively hieroglyphical.
The author's reflections after stopping using emoji:
"In the end, I found myself adding a lot of exclamation marks, "hahaha", and writing more sentences to better communicate my mood. The need to better convey my messages forced me to have a deeper understanding what I was trying to communicate in the first place. Sometimes, a heart means “I love you”, “I miss you”, “I hope you’ll feel better soon”, “I love what you’re saying”, etc. Was I expecting my interlocutors to guess the exact meaning? I’m happy that it forced me to phrase my thoughts, look deeper into them, better identify and express them. I had to write "Thank you" or "That's great!" instead of adding a reaction emoji under a Slack message, Twitter DM, or Discord message, and I like to believe that those words carried more value than one more thumbs up added to the pile."
This helped me make a connection to a larger phenomenon in changing speech, something which I struggle with. Emojis a way of communicating with loose precision. There are also analogous ways to do so while using words. And there are speakers in their daily speech which greatly lean into the saftey of loose precision to the point of subterfurge and agression.
A 'like' softens all opinion. A 'you know' coerces the listener to agree. A 'whatever' implies others' priorities are misplaced. An 'uh' or 'um' is a don't interrupt me! Overreliance on ambiguous prounouns. 'Stuff' or 'Thing'.
I find these mechanisms off putting. They sometimes correlate with paranoia, esteem issues, or sociopathy. So I try to avoid such speakers if possible, since I feel like an asshole to point it out.
It's ok to wait until your thoughts are formed. It's ok to be incorrect. Pick your target and try to hit it. If you communicate with loose precision or emoji you inhibit building knowledge together.
> Sometimes, a heart means “I love you”, “I miss you”, “I hope you’ll feel better soon”, “I love what you’re saying”, etc. Was I expecting my interlocutors to guess the exact meaning? I’m happy that it forced me to phrase my thoughts, look deeper into them, better identify and express them.
Actually, I think the ambiguity can be an advantage. One interesting thing I noticed in communicating in a foreign language is that sometimes, I'll feel like either of two meanings might be appropriate -- and the other language has a word that might have either sense. It always feels like a big win to use that word when that happens.
On the other hand, I used to message someone frequently who would use really weird emoji like a pig face, and who steadfastly refused to ever explain what any of them meant. That got annoying.
> Sometimes, a heart means “I love you”, “I miss you”, “I hope you’ll feel better soon”, “I love what you’re saying”, etc. Was I expecting my interlocutors to guess the exact meaning?
Actually yes. That’s one of the lovely parts of language. You don’t need to be explicit to convey the correct meaning. Consider:
A: My cat passed away.
B: <3
A: I bought you chocolate!
B: <3
A: Only one more week and I’ll be home!
B: <3
A: I think I’m going to start working out again.
B: <3
I don’t think any normal person would have trouble interpreting those.
Stickers are the superior choice. Check out LINE where users can customize their stickers with their own captions. Or Telegram where users discover stickers from other users rather than a central store.
>What we saw was, if you go too far in that [representational] direction because you want to be inclusive, people don’t see themselves represented and they’re not going to use it. You have to have enough specificity to represent you enough, but not so inclusive that your emoji palette is hundreds of thousands of emoji.
Scott McCloud wrote a whole book about this: "Understanding Comics".
>One of the book's key concepts is that of "masking," a visual style, dramatic convention, and literary technique described in the chapter on realism. It is the use of simplistic, archetypal, narrative characters, even if juxtaposed with detailed, photographic, verisimilar, spectacular backgrounds. This may function, McCloud infers, as a mask, a form of projective identification. His explanation is that a familiar and minimally detailed character allows for a stronger emotional connection and for viewers to identify more easily.
>The masking effect or masking is a visual style, dramatic convention, and literary technique described by cartoonist Scott McCloud in his book Understanding Comics in the chapter on realism. It is the use of simplistic, archetypal, narrative characters, even if juxtaposed with detailed, photographic, verisimilar, spectacular backgrounds. This may function, McCloud infers, as a mask, a form of projective identification. His explanation is that a familiar and minimally detailed character allows for a stronger emotional connection and for viewers to identify more easily.
Scott McCloud and Will Wright discussed masking and other issues in their 2002 GDC discussion, "When Maps Collide":
Understanding Comics and masking influenced The Sims 1 graphics architecture and design (using detailed pre-rendered 2d+z sprites for the environment and simplistic real time 3d graphics for the people), which fortunately ran fast on the common un-accelerated 3d graphics hardware of the time (greatly expanding the user base), and synergistically enabled user created content (which was essential to its success) which I described in this earlier post:
>Going 3D at that time in history meant that the quality of the graphic would take a huge hit, as well as the rendering speed, and fewer people would be able to run it because it would require a high end computer, so it was just not worth it.
>Using 2D pre-rendered sprites means that the artists can use as many polygons, rich textures and lighting techniques as they want in 3D Studio Max, and tweak them until the sprites look perfect, and that's exactly what the user sees. You just could not approach anywhere near that quality with 3D graphics at the time. Of course things are a lot different now!
>That was during the time that The Sims was also in development. One reason The Sims was successful is that it did not try to be full 3D, and ran well on low-end computers (the old computer that little sister inherits from big brother when he upgrades to a gaming machine). It used a hybrid 2D/3D system of z-buffered sprites, with an orthographic projection constrained to four rotations, three zooms, and only the characters were rendered with polygons into the pre-rendered z-buffered scene, using DirectX's software renderer.
>I developed the character animation system and content creation tools for The Sims, and when the EA executives were reviewing the technology to decide if they should buy Maxis, to justify our approach I bought them a copy of Scott McCloud's book Understanding Comics, which explained a concept called "masking" --
>Hergé's Tintin comics are a great example of how that works: The idea is that by making the background environment very realistic (i.e. rich pre-rendered sprites from high poly models), and the characters themselves more abstract (i.e. efficient real time 3d texture mapped low poly models), the readers (players) can more easily project themselves into the scene and identify with the characters. Much in the same way an abstract happy face can represent everyone, while a photograph of a person's face only represents that person.
>The other fortunate consequence was that it was easy for players to create their own characters and objects by editing the textures and sprites with 2D tools like Photoshop, without requiring difficult 3D modeling tools like 3D Studio Max, so that enabled a lot of user created content by kids instead of professional artists, which was essential to the success of the game.
Wow, this is such a wrong way of interpreting the way things are, that you're finding offense where none was probably intended.
Have you ever witnessed the "eww, foreign shit" thought process, or did you invent this in your head? Emojis are used all over the world that I can't imagine anyone thinking they're a "Japanese thing". Yeah they're from Japan but your imaginary racism accusation is so weird to me, if it's real, to me it would be like meeting someone who does not use flush toilets because s/he doesn't like the British.
There are technical reasons for not supporting Unicode, e.g. to prevent garbling like https://www.zalgo.org/ , but throwing things like "not supporting emojis (I'm going to mansplain to you that emojis is part of Unicode) is sexist is just... Argh! For your own sake, I suggest you stop it with the identity politics and looking to be butthurt by any perceived offense, it won't lead to a life of happiness, and you'd be the irrational one who's looking for conflict, sadly while believing you're the sane one in a holy crusade against infidels. (Ha, for the sake of analogy, it's just like Isis/Al-Qaeda think they're the righteous ones whereas the rest of the world sees them as the bad guys).
I don't know why I want to save people from themselves in an HN comment box, but here's me trying. Although I think you're already so offended that you'll totally ignore this.
Why is it ok on HN to write "That's funny lol" but not ok to write "That's funny :emoji-for-laugh:". Sure I get that no offense is intended but if twice as many women prefer the second form over the first then HN is unintentionally preferring male communication over female communication.
It's not like it would be hard for HN to enable support. In fact they're intentionally disallowing it. I'm sure they have their reasons. I'm just pointing out that the results happen to affect women more than men
We're talking about peppering one's writing with brightly colored little pictures. If a dislike of that is anything, it's ageist: I don't want the way I write to give people the impression that I'm a ten year old.
This is a pretty big leap to be honest - and this argument can be made for nearly anything if you look for it.
For example: emoji are difficult for vision impaired people to work with, and use of emoji to convey meaning reduces accessibility. You could argue that using emoji or advocating for emoji use is ableist.
Some people add them after nouns on their Facebook updates, e.g. my last sentence would have the "man and woman" emoji after the word "people". So their posts look like my kindergarten worksheet where we had to complete sentences by identifying the pictures and filling in the blank space next to them.
Emojis are extremely useful for personality matching on Tinder. My favourite is the non-smoking emoji as I would never date a person who is smoking, but there are many other things that I love in life and emojis give me a way to communicate them visually.
Interesting, given the examples in this article and [1] of confusion and miscommunication caused by differences in how different platforms depict the same emoji.
So in the context of online dating, does that mean that humans are now selecting for the best compatibility between users of the same mobile platforms? :)
I can see how some apps decided to switch to their own emoji sets...
My 18-year old son, who I mostly communicate through text messages, went cold on me recently. I assumed he was angry about something so I called him. No, he had decided to give up using 'childish' emoji. I asked him to reconsider.
I am firmly of the opinion that emoji are incredibly useful and that normal speech is full of emotion and playfulness that hastily written text cannot convey. You should therefore be using them in your workplace. If you don't use emoji you will be misunderstood. No matter how well written your prose is the recipients may only have time to skim-read it.
Using emoji are, in my opinion, very 'professional'.