Shady Characters – The secret life of punctuation

Emoji, part 6a: the trouble with emoji

February 13, 2019

The emoji season of 2019 is upon us. Every year or so for the past half-decade, successive batches of new emoji have issued forth from the hallowed conference rooms of the Unicode Consortium. This year, the emoji gods sent down their new creations — focused on improving representation of people with disabilities — on the 5^th of February.1

This yearly tradition is much younger than emoji itself. Emoji has always had an ambiguous relationship with culture, ethnicity and gender — which was forgivable, perhaps, in 1999, when emoji were monochromatic 12 × 12 icons unable to communicate anything much more nuanced than “this is a person’s face”. Fifteen years later, when they had morphed into full-colour, professionally-drawn icons promoted by a bevy of global tech giants, emoji’s ongoing gender bias and cultural insensitivity was starting to look less naïve than it was wilfully ignorant.

Yellow-skinned smileys in Twitter's 2014 emoji — Twitter’s 2014 smileys. (CC-BY 4.0 images taken from Twemoji version 1.4.0.)

Consider the state of emoji in June 2014, just after their first major update since standardisation in 2010.2,3 And take, for example, the cartoonish yellow colour sported by smileys across the emoji spectrum (including those available on Twitter, as shown above4). It was a deliberately unrealistic skin colour, a hand-me-down from the days of Harvey Ball’s original 1963 smileys that happened to be so conspicuously artificial as to head off any perception of racial discrimination.5,6 Or at least, so the theory went. Unfortunately, it did just the opposite.

Most obviously, emoji’s yellow smileys sailed perilously close to invoking the old-fashioned stereotype of the “yellow-skinned” Asian — an issue that went unremarked (or, worse, unnoticed) for an uncomfortably long time. Moreover, many commentators drew parallels between emoji’s smiling yellow faces and the bright yellow cartoon characters depicted in The Simpsons,5,7,8 a popular animated series, but, despite their stylised skin colour, Bart, Homer, Lisa, Maggie and Marge were plainly meant to be white. Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, claimed to have chosen the colour yellow solely because it might catch the eye of a channel-hopping viewer, but that raised the question of why the show’s non-white characters were given brown skin of various hues.9,10 Whether one saw a crude yellow-face stereotype or a white person masquerading as some impossible, aracial ideal, emoji’s yellow-skinned smileys have never been without baggage.

White people in Twitter's 2014 emoji — White people in Twitter’s 2014 smileys. (CC-BY 4.0 images taken from Twemoji version 1.4.0.)

Misguided or not, the typical yellow-faced smiley at least aspired to the idea that emoji could transcend race. When Twitter, Apple and others applied themselves to emoji’s more realistic characters, such as GIRL (👧), BOY (👦), WOMAN (👩) or MAN (👨), there was no escaping the fact that they were, to an emoji, white.11* It was not a good look.

Gender roles in Twitter's 2014 emoji — Gender roles in Twitter’s 2014 smileys. (CC-BY 4.0 images taken from Twemoji version 1.4.0.)

Skin colour was not the only problem with emoji in 2014. Most emoji with an identifiable gender were arranged along what might be charitably called traditional lines: only men could be police officers or construction workers; only women danced, got their hair cut or went for a massage; and only heterosexual couples could kiss or raise children.3† Perhaps this should not be surprising: the pocket bell pagers that gave rise to emoji did not embody the most progressive attitudes to gender. One model came in a girls’ version, pre-loaded with messages such as “I’m happy” and “I won’t forgive you”, and a boys’ version with missives such as “I’m sorry”.12

Culturally-specific symbols in Twitter's 2014 emoji — Culturally-specific symbols in Twitter’s 2014 emoji. (CC-BY 4.0 images taken from Twemoji version 1.4.0.)

Finally, 2014’s emoji were culturally lopsided. Having spawned emoji in the first place, Japan figured heavily in the contemporary emoji lexicon: Japan claimed the only national map and flag icons in the set (🗾, 🎌); a disproportionate number of emoji food items were Japanese, including sushi (🍣), a bento box (🍱) and a rice cracker (🍘); the country’s famed bullet train received its own emoji (🚅), as distinct from the more generic HIGH-SPEED TRAIN in use in other countries (🚄); not to mention a host of Japanese cultural peculiarities such as love hotels (🏩), carp-shaped streamers (🎏), wind chimes (🎐), and the yearly “moon viewing ceremony” (🎑). Elsewhere, there were thinly-veiled ethnic stereotypes of Western, Chinese and Indian people.13

Emoji’s diverse collection of users surveyed this problematic set of symbols, at once sprawling and patchy, and began to ask themselves: why don’t they speak for me?

The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem, so they say, but Unicode was reluctant to take that step.

Back in 2008, the Unicode Consortium launched a consultation about what it called “emoji”, an idiosyncratic set of Japanese symbols it proposed to add to the standard. One notable response came from Ed Trager, the owner of a website about Unicode fonts, who was forthright about emoji’s limitations:

There is a symbol for “BLOND PERSON” — but in Japanese this is a 西洋人 or 白人 — in other words, a Westerner or Caucasian. And “MAN WITH LONG MOUSTACHE” is really a 中国人 — a “Chinese Man”. And “MAN WITH TURBAN” is really a インド人 — a Hindu. […] Wouldn’t it really be much more tactful if we had some symbols for people of other ethnic backgrounds as well?

How about FLAGS? The selection is ridiculously limited and arbitrary. Better encode flags of all of the nations of the world, if that is even possible without large dispute. Nice can of worms there too. […] There are also EAR OF RICE and CORN and CHESTNUT and PINEAPPLE. Fine, but where is ACORN and SHAFT OF WHEAT and RAMBUTAN and MANGO and MEDJOOL DATE? […] Interestingly, there is a CHAPEL but I don’t see a BUDDHIST TEMPLE or SHINTO SHRINE (even though this is a set of Japanese origin?). Weird.14

Cultural, ethnic and geographic biases galore, and all this before emoji had even been ratified in the standard. But the Unicode Consortium was not ready to grasp the nettle. Emoji debuted in 2010, as part of Unicode 6.0, and Trager’s concerns were not addressed.

Three years later, a recently laid-off NASA programme manager named Katrina Parrott took matters into her own hands — and this time Unicode took notice. Published to the Apple App Store on the 11th of October, 2013, Parrott’s self-funded “iDiversicons” app gave users hundreds of emoji-like icons depicting female construction workers, male nurses, people of colour, multi-ethnic families, same-sex couples, and more.15 Parrott wrote:

Introducing iDiversicons: The amazing new set of emoticons that show the world how you really feel. Representing an entire world of faces, iDiversicons offers everything from African-American and Asian, to Latino/Hispanic, Indian, Caucasian and Biracial.

iDiversicons attracted a respectable amount of media attention, featuring in the Houston Chronicle, Bustle, The Daily Dot and other outlets,15,16,17 but Parrott did not stop there. Within months of her app’s launch, she had submitted a series of proposals to Unicode18,19 asking them to incorporate iDiversicons into the standard and joined the consortium as an individual member to agitate for change from within.20

In March 2014, soon after iDiversicons’ debut, a contributing writer for MTV named Joey Parker took it upon himself — apropos of very little, it seems — to email Apple’s CEO Tim Cook to ask him why there were so few non-white emoji available on the company’s devices. Katie Cotton, VP of worldwide communications at Apple, responded on Cook’s behalf:

Our emoji characters are based on the Unicode standard, which is necessary for them to be displayed properly across many platforms. There needs to be more diversity in the emoji character set, and we have been working closely with the Unicode Consortium in an effort to update the standard.21

Cotton’s message was the closest thing to an official admission that emoji had some growing-up to do. Unfortunately, it came too late to make much of a difference: published in June 2014, Unicode version 7.0 added more than two hundred new emoji (most of them refugees from Microsoft’s Wingdings typeface22) but it was clear that little had been done to fix emoji’s lack of diversity.23 Smileys were still yellow; families were still headed by mum and dad; and police officers were still men.

But Apple’s mea culpa signalled that emoji’s honeymoon period was over. If the media in 2010 had been too starstruck by emoji’s debut to critically evaluate its contents, four years later the lustre had worn off. Reporting on Unicode’s 2014 update, an article written by Eric Brown of the International Business Times was titled “Unicode Unveils 250 New Emoji, Gets Thumbs Down For Diversity”.24 Writing in The Guardian, Alex Hern cited a petition to raise awareness of the near-unbroken whiteness of Apple’s emoji.25 And over at New York magazine’s website for women, The Cut, Allison Davis set out a semi-satirical list of emoji missing from Unicode 7.0 that included “Afro (Black-person emoji, please.)”, “Jewfro (Curly hair transcends color.)”, “Two Women With Child (Equality!)”, “Two Men With Child (Equality!)”, “Two Women With Biracial Child (Equality! Diversity!)”, and so on.26 Emoji was in the news again, and for all the wrong reasons.

Now, finally, Unicode got it. And having got it, they moved remarkably quickly to tackle the problem.

In August 2014, just months after the disappointment of Unicode 7.0, the consortium’s technical director and president co-wrote a memo that envisioned a more inclusive character set. “L2/14-172R — Proposed enhancements for emoji characters: background” might not have won points for nominal creativity, but in it Peter Edberg and Mark Davis were candid about emoji’s problems. “It is clear that the Unicode Consortium needs to address more quickly some of the issues that have come up”, they wrote, calling attention to emoji’s lack of ethnic and cultural diversity.27 It was the starting gun for some long-overdue introspection on Unicode’s part, and it signalled a sea change in emoji as a whole.

The first visible result of Edberg and Davis’s memo came in June 2015 in the form of Unicode 8.0, yet another version of the standard — and one that arrived rather ahead of schedule. Unicode 6.0, the first edition to contain emoji, had been published in 2010; version 7.0 came in 2014; and now Unicode 8.0 had appeared less than a year after that.2,3,28 Squint, and it almost looked like Unicode were starting to take emoji seriously.

Many of Unicode 8.0’s new emoji characters, such as such as ROBOT FACE (🤖), TURKEY (🦃), and BOTTLE WITH POPPING CORK (🍾), were relatively pedestrian. Arriving with them, however, was a group of five disembodied patches of skin — ‘🏻’, ‘🏼’, ‘🏽’, ‘🏾’, and ‘🏿’ — that were less easy to fathom.29 By themselves, EMOJI MODIFIER FITZPATRICK TYPE 1, EMOJI MODIFIER FITZPATRICK TYPE 2 et al did very little, but when used in combination with certain other emoji they made a world of difference. And Unicode 8.0 made use of another character, too, that turned emoji on its head. All of this came together not in the virtual doorstop that was Unicode version 8.0, but in a new and, relatively speaking, accessible document.

Enter Emoji 1.0.

Bear with me for a moment, because we need to make a brief but sexy detour into the world of version numbering. Major revisions of the Unicode Consortium’s eponymous standard have always been named Unicode 1.0, Unicode 2.0, and so on. In August 2015, however, in the wake of Unicode 8.0, the group published a supplementary document called “Unicode® Technical Report #51: Unicode Emoji”30 which was both a guide to the technical aspects of emoji encoding and a list of all emoji characters that existed in the main Unicode 8.0 standard itself. It was a field guide to emoji, in essence, cherry-picking those parts of the Unicode standard that related to emoji and eliding the rest, and it came to be known by the slightly more wieldy name of “Emoji 1.0”.31,1

Emoji 1.0 freed emoji from Unicode’s rigorous and conservative standardisation process. The basic concept of Unicode was unchanged — every single character included in the Unicode standard, whether emoji or not, still had to be voted on and approved by the full Unicode Technical Committe and ratified by the (deep breath) Coded Character Sets standardization subcommittee of ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 — but with Emoji 1.0 the Unicode Consortium was giving emoji a shortcut. For reasons you may already have guessed at, it was now possible to combine multiple emoji characters to create new composite glyphs, but with the caveat that such new glyphs were recommendations only, rather than “real” Unicode characters. Henceforth, the main Unicode standard would contain only standalone characters; Emoji 1.0 and its successors, on the other hand, would list all recommended combinations of emoji.1 A small but significant wedge had been driven between staid old Unicode and vibrant, vital emoji.

The first group of composite characters introduced with Emoji 1.0 came courtesy of the five skin colour emoji described above. These five tones drew on a dermatological classification called the “Fitzpatrick scale” that categorized skin tone by a person’s reaction to ultraviolet light.32 When placed immediately after one of a designated set of emoji (all of which displayed at least some skin), a Fitzpatrick modifier glyph caused the emoji to change its skin tone so that, for example, the BABY emoji took on a more realistic skin colour: 👶 + 🏾 = 👶🏾 .30 The method of combining a regular emoji with a Fitzpatrick modifier simply by placing the two next to each other was simple and robust: if a given messaging app or web browser understood that ‘👶’ and ‘🏾’ could be combined, so much the better; if not, and the two were displayed as separate glyphs, the reader would at least still get the general idea: “👶‌🏾”.

Beyond the Fitzpatrick modifiers, the key to Emoji 1.0’s next parlour trick was a previously unheralded character called the ZERO WIDTH JOINER. I would reproduce it here, but there is no point: the ZWJ, as it is usually called, is one of a handful of Unicode characters that have no visible representation but rather exist to change the behaviour of the “real” characters around them. The ZWJ, for its part, had been created to help make sense of certain complex scripts such as Arabic, Devanagari and Malayalam, where two abutting letters could take one form or another depending on context: the ZWJ “glued” such characters together; its sibling, the ZERO WIDTH NON JOINER, held them apart.33‡

When applied to emoji, the ZERO WIDTH JOINER opened the door to a much more diverse character set. Unlike the skin tone modifiers, the ZWJ did not simply change the colour of existing emoji; instead, it created entirely new glyphs. The prototypical example given in Emoji 1.0 was as follows: 👩 + ZWJ + ❤️ + ZWJ + 👩 = 👩‍❤️‍👩 , creating a same-sex couple emoji that, along with tens of similar composite glyphs, sailed blissfully past the lumbering ISO/IEC standardisation process.30

Taken together, Emoji 1.0’s skin tone modifiers and ZWJ-based symbols marked fundamental shifts both in how emoji worked on a technical level and in the set of symbols that we, the users, could make use of in our online writings. Moreover, Emoji 1.0 was the first of many emoji updates that would make a splash in the mainstream press, giving rise to the annual festival of “emoji season”, in which commentators pick over the new glyphs that will soon make an appearance on their smartphones and computers.

Next time, we’ll take a look at some of the new symbols that emoji season has brought us over the years and, in doing so, we’ll see just how difficult it is to build a truly representative character set.

1.: Jeremy Burge, “230 New Emojis in Final List for 2019”, Emojipedia Blog, 2019. ↢
2.: “Unicode{\textregistered} 6.0.0”, Unicode.Org, 2010. ↢
3.: “Unicode{\textregistered} 7.0.0”, Unicode.Org, 2014. ↢
4.: “Twemoji v1.4.0”, 2014. ↢
5.: Caitlin Dewey, “Are Apple’s New ‘yellow face’ Emoji Racist?”, Washington Post, February–2015. ↢
6.: Mark Davis and Peter Edberg, “Unicode Technical Standard #51: Unicode Emoji (version 11.0)”, Unicode.Org, 2018. ↢
7.: Robinson Meyer, “Finally, Emoji People of Color”, The Atlantic, February–2015. ↢
8.: Andrew McGill, “Why White People Don’t Use White Emoji”, The Atlantic, 2016. ↢
9.: “Hotseat: The Simpsons Creator Matt Groening”, CBBC Newsround, 2007. ↢
10.: Zara Rahman, “The Problem With Emoji Skin Tones That No One Talks About”, The Daily Dot, 2018. ↢
11.: Jeremy Burge, “Man Emoji”, Emojipedia. ↢
12.: Tamiko Lippit, “Japan Teens Flip for Private Pagers”, International Herald Tribune, April–1995. ↢
13.: The Unicode Consortium, The Unicode Standard, Version 6.0 - Archived Code Charts, 2010. ↢
14.: Ed Trager, “Emoji: Public Review December 2008 - A Very Pretty Can of Worms Indeed”, Unicode Mail List Archive, 2008. ↢
15.: Heather Alexander, “Mom’s New Line of Diverse Emoticons Includes Same Sex Couples, Brown Faces”, Houston Chronicle, July–2014. ↢
16.: Elizabeth Robinson, “The One-Woman Mission to Diversify Emoji”, The Daily Dot, July–2014. ↢
17.: Lucia Peters, “IDiversicons Give Us the Emoji Diversity We Need (Finally!)”, Bustle, July–2014. ↢
18.: Katrina Parrott, “L2/14-085: UTC Document Submission: Request Approval to Add ‘Our New IDiversicons: Diverse Emoji Characters’ to the Next Updated Unicode Standard”, 2014. ↢
19.: Shervin Afshar and Katrina Parrott, “L2/14-154R: Report on Diversity Emoji Use in IDiversicons and Proposal to Add New Emoji from IDiversicons Collection to Unicode”, 2014. ↢
20.: Alicia Lutes, “Chattin’ Diversity, Emojis, and Representation With iDiversicons’ Katrina Parrott”, Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls, June–2015. ↢
21.: Joey Parker, “What Does Apple Think About The Lack Of Diversity In Emojis? We Have Their Response.”, MTV Act, March–2014. ↢
22.: “Emoji Versions & Sources, v11.0”, Unicode.Org, 2018. ↢
23.: Jeremy Burge, “Unicode Version 7.0”, Emojipedia. ↢
24.: Eric Brown, “Unicode Unveils 250 New Emoji, Gets Thumbs Down For Diversity”, International Business Times, June–2014. ↢
25.: Alex Hern, “More Than 250 New Emojis Announced by Unicode”, The Guardian, June–2014. ↢
26.: Allison P. Davis, “Life Won’t Be Complete Until We Get These Emojis”, The Cut, June–2014. ↢
27.: Peter Edberg and Mark Davis, “L2/14-172R: Proposed Enhancements for Emoji Characters: Background”, 2014. ↢
28.: Exception when rendering entry (Unicode800) ↢
29.: Jeremy Burge, “Unicode Version 8.0”, Emojipedia. ↢
30.: Mark Davis and Peter Edberg, “Unicode Technical Report #51: Unicode Emoji (version 1.0)”, Unicode.Org, 2015. ↢
31.: Jeremy Burge, “Emoji Version 1.0”, Emojipedia. ↢
32.: Thomas Fitzpatrick B, “The Validity and Practicality of Sun-Reactive Skin Types I Through VI”, June–1988. ↢
33.: The Unicode Consortium, “3.0 New Character Semantics”, in Unicode Standard, Version 1.1, 1993, 5-8. ↢

*: Yes, they are yellow now. Come back next time to find out why. ↢
†: There was one glimmer of hope, in that two men could hold hands (👬), or two women (👭).3 ↢
‡: Ironically, in order to demonstrate the fallback rendering of a BABY emoji followed by a Fitzpatrick skin tone modifier (👶‌🏾), I had to place a ZERO WIDTH NON JOINER between the two to stop them being rendered as a single glyph. ↢

Emoji, part 5: a trending topic

December 31, 2018

So far in this series we’ve seen how emoji were created in Japan, how they made their way into the wider world, and who takes responsibility for them now they’re free to range across our screens. Aside from mentions in a few tech news outlets, however, emoji’s early life went largely unreported. The mainstream media prefers a juicier drama and, in this article, we’ll take a look at some of the stories that have seen emoji riding high — and low — in the press.

It can feel like emoji have been around forever, but Google’s search trends tool pinpoints the surprisingly recent moment at which emoji caught 🔥: it was June 2014,1 a month in which two events in particular caught the popular imagination. The first was the arrival of the seventh edition of a hitherto-obscure technical standard called Unicode, in which the addition of 250 so-called emoji characters was cause for wild celebration. But the associated media frenzy was slightly misplaced. It is true that Unicode labelled 250 new glyphs as emoji, but 248 of them were actually dingbats, taken from Microsoft’s ubiquitous “Wingdings” pi font, and most of those were recommended to be drawn as sober, monochrome symbols rather than joyous, multicoloured emoji.2,3 As we saw last time round, the only genuinely new emoji were SLIGHTLY SMILING FACE (🙂) and SLIGHTLY FROWNING FACE (🙁).4

Even so, it was apparent that emoji had fired the popular imagination, and the second event that occurred in June 2014 was designed to piggyback on exactly this phenomenon. Enter “Emojli”, the first and so far only social network limited to the use of emoji. Emojli was founded on June 30, 2014, by a broadcast engineer named Matt Gray and a YouTube producer called Tom Scott. Inspired by the launch of Unicode’s new emoji, Gray and Scott created a “Coming soon!” website allowing users to pre-register their choice of username (comprising only emoji, of course) on what was, at that point, an entirely fictitious social network.5,6 70,000 reservations later the pair felt duty bound to turn Emojli from a joke into reality in the form of a messaging app that could send only emoji.7

The media, both new and old, could not get enough. Drawing comparisons with another social network named “Yo” (itself a hair’s breadth from outright parody, Yo’s only feature was the ability to exchange messages containing the word “Yo”),8 Emojli was featured by the Daily Mail, Forbes, The Verge, the Washington Post, Time and more.9,10,11,12,13 Soon, news outlets began to widen their search for novel emoji stories. The lack of diversity in emoji skin tones became a public issue for the first time.14 Australian politician Julie Bishop, then president of the the UN Security Council, raised columnists’ eyebrows after spending a day replying to tweets using only emoji.15* Fast Company ran an inadvertently Freudian “Oral History of the Poop Emoji”,18 while NBA player Mike Scott gained a rare mainstream interview because of his extensive emoji tattoos.19

The following year was no different. As President Barack Obama welcomed Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to the White House in April 2015, the president thanked his guest for Japan’s cultural exports of “manga and anime, and, of course, emojis”.20 That same month, former Wimbledon champion Andy Murray raised the profile of Scotland’s wedding of the year — that is, his own — by posting a tweet about it comprising only emoji:21

🌞☔😂👔💅💇😂👰😂🚗💒💃👫🙏💍💏👏📝🎹📷🎥🚗🍷🍴🎂🎊🎉👯🎶🎤🍹🍻🍷🍺🍩🍦🍷🍹🍸🍺🌙❤💕😘💤💤💤💤💤💤💤22

Also in April 2015, Snapchat, a zeitgeisty messaging service, modified its apps to use emoji to show relationships between users. “Best friend” relationships, where two users exchanged the bulk of their messages with each other, were labelled with “💛”, one-sided relationships with “😏︎”, “love triangles” with “😬”, and so on. It was a savvy use of emoji, partly because those little symbols conveyed a whole multitude of teenage angsts in a mere thirty-two bits each, but mostly because it propelled Snapchat into the headlines for some free publicity.23† May, too, was another notable month for emoji: the United Arab Emirates made waves when they threatened to prosecute anyone caught using the middle finger emoji (🖕), while over in the UK, the BBC reported that emoji were “the fastest growing form of language in history”.24,25

Matt Gray and Tom Scott shuttered Emojli in mid-2015, tired of providing technical support for what was essentially a joke gone viral (Gray: “We don’t want it to die”; Scott: “We just don’t want it to live either”).7 Alone among the big news outlets, Forbes and Business Insider lamented Emojli’s passing,26,27 but they did not linger long upon it. Emojli was old news, and the firehose of new emoji stories showed no signs of slowing. Kurita’s symbols had taken on a life of their own in the unrelenting glare of the media.

In February 2015, as the emoji trend-o-meter crept ever upwards, a dating network called Match.com published the results of a survey of single Americans. Entitled Singles in America, the survey revealed that online daters were more likely than their real-world counterparts to have a full-time job, to be educated to university level or higher and, ironically, to conduct break-ups without the aid of their smartphones.28 But this was not what caught the headlines. No, what the Guardian, the Huffington Post, Time and USA Today29,30,31,32 rushed to tell their readers was that a higher level of emoji use was an accurate predictor of which singles had more sex.33‡

As with Snapchat, Match.com were not shy in using emoji to attract attention. Press releases and corporate blog posts about the survey were widely quoted, so that we discovered that women who used kissing emoji more than others and who had sex with familiar partners found it easier to reach orgasm.35§ We learned about respondents’ favourite amorous emoji, such as “😉”, “😊”, and “😘”.37 It was all was gently titillating, a Pythonesque nudge and a wink for the internet age, but it rather missed the point: emoji were and had been in use as overtly sexual symbols almost from the beginning.

It is time to talk about the aubergine in the room. And be aware: the following paragraphs contain figurative emoji nudity.

As described by The Daily Dot’s John-Michael Bond in his 2016 article A beginner’s guide to sexting with emoji, the modern descendants of Shigetaka Kurita’s little icons have become a godsend for horny internet users: TACO (🌮), PEACH (🍑) and AUBERGINE (🍆) have made their way into the sexting canon as go-to symbols for the vagina, bottom, and penis, with many other emoji along for the ride. If the taco seems too vulgar, for instance, rest assured that the euphemistic HONEY POT (🍯) and TULIP (🌷) are viable alternatives, as is the rather more risqué CAT FACE (🐱). Correspondents who feel uncomfortable with an aubergine, so to speak, might choose to use a shrimp instead (🍤); or, if they prefer to keep things vegetarian, the once-popular BANANA (🍌).38

The aubergine stands out as mascot of the emoji sexual revolution to the extent that “🍆” has become almost wholly dissociated from real aubergines in favour of its saucy alternative meaning. Writing in the rarefied pages of Duke University’s American Speech journal, lexicographers Ben Zimmer, Jane Solomon and Charles E. Carson trace its emergence as graphical slang for “penis” as far back as 2011, barely a year after it first entered the emoji vocabulary.39 Its star has only risen since then. The aubergine’s first big appearance in the public eye came in 2015, when the photo sharing service Instagram banned searches for “🍆” because it was a surefire way to find penis-related contraventions of the site’s code of conduct.40 A year later, the aubergine was back in the news when a British publicity flack named Jack Kenyon launched eggplantmail.com, a service whereby customers could anonymously send an aubergine to their person of their choice. (Incredibly, this PR disaster-in-waiting lives on today: as Kenyon described it at the time, it was and remains “100% phallic. 100% anonymous. 100% disturbing.”)41 Later again in 2016, condom maker Durex stoked the fire by tweeting a hoax advert for aubergine-flavoured prophylactics.42,43

The peach emoji provides the aubergine’s only real competition in the sexy-emoji-in-the-news stakes, but it hit a bum note in 2016. A glance at Emojipedia’s visual history of the peach demonstrates that through the emoji ages, and across many emoji platforms, the shape of the “🍑” has always leaned towards the gluteal. As with the aubergine, in fact, the peach has come close to shedding its original meaning. In December 2016, for example, Emojipedia found that the top five words used in tweets that also contained a peach emoji were “like”, “ass”, “peach”, “badgirl”, and “booty”, and that a mere 7% of tweets containing a “🍑” actually referred to the fruit itself.44 The peach’s beatification (or debasement, depending on your point of view), was complete.

This might go some way to explaining the collective shout of anger sent up in November 2016 when Apple changed the appearance of the “🍑” in a test version of iOS, its mobile operating system. The new, rounder and generally more believable “🍑” was part of a general overhaul of Apple’s emoji that gave existing symbols a lick of paint and added new ones to bring iOS into line with Unicode version 9.0. Reaction was swift and dismayed and, such was the power of emoji, much of it emanated from parts of the media unused to caring about the minutiae of software beta testing. “I, for one, am furious”, wrote Charlie Warzel of Buzzfeed in an opus that bemoaned the neutering of the peach emoji as “the worst kind of gentrification of the internet”.45 At Cosmopolitan, Elizabeth Narins considered that “shit has hit the fan”,46 while an unimpressed EJ Dickson of Glamour likened the new design to “one of those foamy Fisher Price balls your teachers made you use in gym class because they were afraid of getting sued by the parents”.47 Apple’s new peach had gone pear-shaped.

To its credit, Apple backed down almost as soon as the scale of the outrage became clear. The first polemics on the family-friendly “🍑” redesign were published at the start of November 2016; the very same writers and news outlets were reporting on the reinstatement of the older, fruitier peach barely a fortnight later.48,49 And so it is today that the “🍑” has returned to its euphemistic roots: it, and emoji in general, remain attentive to your bedroom needs.

In their brief existence, emoji have colonised almost all aspects of online communication. We live in a world in which businesspeople have to be reminded not to use “🍆” in formal emails;50 where Julie Bishop, the emoji-loving UN official, can give an interview using only emoji;51 and where Patrick Stewart, Shakespearean stalwart and Star Trek’s Jean-Luc Picard, can voice a talking “💩” in an animated movie designed solely to capitalise on tween emoji fever.52 Like all forms of communication, however, ubiquity has its down side (and not only because, I am led to believe, The Emoji Movie is terrible): the more often people use emoji, the more often emoji find themselves employed in less than innocent circumstances.

That emoji could have a less savoury side was foreshadowed in 2013 by its ASCII ancestor, the emoticon. In July that year, a medical researcher named Dr Robert Ferrante was arrested in West Virgina for poisoning his wife, Dr Autumn Klein, with a cyanide-spiked energy drink. Among the evidence presented by prosecutors was an exchange of text messages in which Klein asked her husband, “Will [the energy drink] stimulate egg production too?” Ferrante replied with a smiling emoticon. It may not have been the first time an emoticon was used in court, but it does seem to have been the first time the media picked up on it. CBS News, People, the BBC and others made special mention of Ferrante’s manipulative use of a smiling face.53,54,55

The next criminal emoticon to appear in the news predated Ferrante’s but was only reported in 2014, a year later, when another grim murder case went to trial. On November 29^th, 2009, a Twitter user named Lacey E. Spears had posted the following tweet:

My Sweet Angel Is In The Hospital For The 23rd Time :( Please Pray He Gets To Come Home Soon.56

Spears’s “Sweet Angel” was her son Garnett, as her followers knew, but the sentiment in her tweet — and its jarring emoticon — was in grotesque opposition to the truth. Spears had fed Garnett toxic amounts of salt in order to hospitalize him and, in doing so, to elicit sympathy from friends, family and other well-wishers. The 5-year-old Garnett died in 2014 and Spears was put on trial in New York for his murder. Her lawyers tried to portray her as a doting mother by citing her tweets (including the one above) and highlighting her frequent use of emoticons as proof of her loving intent, but the jury was unconvinced and she received a 20 year sentence in 2015.57,58,59

Emoji joined the macabre party in April 2014 with news of a shooting in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in which the suspected murderer had taunted the sister of his intended victim by text message. “It’s a chess game,” Christopher Levi Jackson wrote, “I’m up two moves a head … try again. Bang bang, bang.” For emphasis, the message ended with 27 gun-related emoji, leading police to arrest Jackson on the strength of his graphic threat.60 In January the next year, at the other end of the country, NYPD officers apprehended one Osiris Aristy for a Facebook post that contained a string of violent emoji, claiming that they “caused New York City police to fear for their safety”.61 Emoji were now grounds for arrest.

Emoji’s criminal associations have only intensified since those first provocative salvos. In December 2014, for instance, papers reported that three Muslim siblings were arrested at Chicago’s O’Hare airport as they boarded a flight to Istanbul on the way to join Islamic State in Syria. The prosecution cited a tweet sent by the 17-year-old sister, who expressed her appreciation of a grisly IS propaganda video with a heart emoji and a smiley face — proof positive, the prosecution said, that she planned to join IS.62 In 2015, as the trial began of Ross Ulbricht, accused of running a notorious online black market, Ulbricht’s defence lawyer successfully argued that emoji in his client’s written correspondence should be presented in full to the court so that there would be no mistaking their true intent.63 And as if to prove that geography is no barrier to emoji appearing in legally fraught circumstances, in 2017 an Israeli landlord successfully sued prospective tenants who had replied to his advert of a house to let with a text that read:

Good morning 😊 Interested in the house 💃🏻👯‍✌️☄️🐿🍾… Just need to discuss the details… When’s a good time for you?64

So encouraged, the landlord took down his advert only to miss out on potential rental income when the clients dropped out without warning. The judge in the case opined:

These icons convey great optimism. Although this message did not constitute a binding contract between the parties, this message naturally led to the Plaintiff’s great reliance on the defendants’ desire to rent his apartment.65

These and other cases have peppered the headlines in the past few years. As they have come and gone, two things have become apparent.

First, emoji (even when gun-shaped) do not reliably constitute smoking guns. A grand jury in the case levelled against alleged Baton Rouge shooter Christopher Levi Jackson were unconvinced that his 27-emoji rant communicated intent to commit murder and declined to prosecute;66 similarly, the NYPD’s complaint against Osiris Aristy was dismissed by a New York grand jury that decided “🔫🔥🔥🔥👮🔫🔫” was not enough to send the 17-year-old to jail.67 Conversely, nor are emoji get-out-of-jail-free cards: black marketeer Ross Ulbricht was ultimately convicted and sentenced to life in prison, so whatever goodwill his lawyer hoped might be conjured by a friendly emoji or two singularly failed to materialise.68

Second, the shifting technological and semantic sands on which emoji are built makes it uniquely difficult to rely on them as evidence. It’s tempting to look at Aristy’s cartoonish water pistols, for instance, and wonder why New York’s finest felt threatened in any way — but in 2014, when Aristy posted the offending message, his “🔫” emoji would have appeared as realistic guns. It was only in April this year that Facebook joined other major emoji platforms in rendering the PISTOL as a harmless plastic toy and thereby taking the menace out of Aristy’s messages.69

These are complex issues and, despite having been taken up by the crime beat journalists, law students and legal scholars who take an interest in such things,70,71,72 it remains to be seen how emoji’s place in court will shake out. To coin a phrase, as far as emoji are concerned, the jury is still out.

So much, then, for the good, the bad and the sexy of emoji news. For all this coverage, perhaps the most telling emoji-related headline of 2018 is one that does not fit into any of the above categories. It appeared on the New York Times website on December 23^rd, 2018, and it read:

Does This Look Right to You? HOLLA🎄D TONNEL73

To put this in context, the Holland Tunnel is a road tunnel that crosses beneath the Hudson from Manhattan to Jersey City.74 Each year for some years the tunnel’s tollbooths have been decorated with giant Christmas decorations in the shape of two wreaths and a Christmas tree. Here is the scene in 2007:

The Holland Tunnel in December 2007. (CC BY-ND 2.0 image courtesy of Flickr user “Kingfox”.)

The first wreath fits neatly over the ‘O’ in “HOLLAND”, but here the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey parts ways from civilised society. Rather than place the Christmas tree over the geometrically friendly ‘A’, the Port Authority hangs it on the antagonistic ‘N’. (The second wreath is placed over the ‘U’ in tunnel, which is certainly frustrating, but at least the ‘U’ and the implied ‘O’ that replaces it are both vowels.)

Irritation with this odious tradition boiled over in the run-up to Christmas 2018, leading to a petition on Change.org that in turn prompted the NYT to weigh in with its emojified “HOLLA🎄D TONNEL” headline. The Port Authority capitulated a few days after the Times’ article and let the public vote on the placement of the decorations; the voters, to their credit, demanded that the Christmas tree be moved to the ‘A’ and the second wreath removed altogether.75

What are we to make of this? For one thing, the public can be trusted to make the correct decision at least some of the time. But for our purposes, the true moral of the story is this: emoji are no longer merely driving the headlines. From this point on, they are quite capable of being the headlines.

1.: “Emoji”, Google Trends, 2018. ↢
2.: Jeremy Burge, “Unicode Version 8.0”, Emojipedia. ↢
3.: “Emoji Versions & Sources, v11.0”, Unicode.Org, 2018. ↢
4.: Karl Pentzlin, “L2/10-429: Proposal to Encode Three Additional Emoticons”, 2010. ↢
5.: Emojli, “Emojli - the Emoji-Only Network Launches Soon! Register Your Username Now at http://emoj.Li”, Twitter, June–2014. ↢
6.: Parmy Olson, “Bye-Bye, Words: An Emoji-Only Social App Is Coming”, Forbes, 2014. ↢
7.: Victoria Turk, “The Creators of Emojli: ’Don’t Build an App’”, Motherboard, September–2014. ↢
8.: Steven Tweedie, “The Rise, Falter, And Future Of Yo”, Business Insider, June–2014. ↢
9.: Victoria Woollaston, “App That Only Lets You Communicate Using EMOJIS Launches - and Even the Usernames Are Made up of Emoticons”, Daily Mail Online, September–2014. ↢
10.: Tara Tiger Brown, “My Emojli Username Is TigerHeartTiger - What’s Yours?”, Forbes, August–2014. ↢
11.: Jacob Kastrenakes, “Emojli Is a Chat App That Only Lets You Send Emoji”, The Verge, June–2014. ↢
12.: Jessica Stahl, “Quiz: Is Your Emoji Game Ready for the Emoji-Only Social Network?”, Washington Post, July–2014. ↢
13.: Laura Stampler, “Emojli: Social Network That Uses Emojis Only”, Time.Com, July–2014. ↢
14.: Andrew Cunningham, “Apple’s Working to Introduce More Diverse emoji—what’s the Holdup?”, Ars Technica, March–2014. ↢
15.: “Julie Bishop Twitter Emoji Use Is Winning Her Fans.”, Mamamia, 2014. ↢
16.: Sarah Kimmorly, “#WorldEmojiDay Is on the Same Day As Emoji Fan Julie Bishop’s Birthday”, Business Insider, July–2015. ↢
17.: Jeremy Burge, “World Emoji Day FAQ”, World Emoji Day. ↢
18.: Lauren Schwartzberg, “The Oral History Of The Poop Emoji (Or, How Google Brought Poop To America)”, Fast Company, 2014. ↢
19.: Sam Laird, “Express Yourself: NBA’s Mike Scott Explains His Sweet Emoji Tattoos”, Mashable, October–2014. ↢
20.: Matt Alt, “How Emoji Got to the White House”, The New Yorker, 2015. ↢
21.: Katie Baillie, “Andy Murray Predicts Entire Wedding Day in Epic Emoji Tweet”, Metro, April–2015. ↢
22.: Andy Murray, “Tweet”, Twitter, April–2015. ↢
23.: Caitlin Dewey, “Snapchat’s Controversial Emoji Update: An Explainer for the Old and/Or Confused”, The Washington Post, April–2015. ↢
24.: Mari Shibata, “The Middle Finger Emoji Could Land You in Jail in the UAE”, Motherboard, 2015. ↢
25.: Anna Doble, “UK’s Fastest Growing Language is... Emoji”, BBC Newsbeat, 2015. ↢
26.: Erin Griffith, “Emojli Emoji Social Network to Shut down”, Fortune, June–2015. ↢
27.: Matt Weinberger, “Emojli Emoji-Only Social Network Shuts down”, Business Insider, June–2015. ↢
28.: “Singles in America 2015”, Match.Com, 2015. ↢
29.: Jess Zimmerman, “Are You a Smug Emoji Snob? Chances Are you’re Not Getting Laid”, The Guardian, February–2015. ↢
30.: Chris York, “Emoji Use Linked To Great Sex Life And Better Orgasms”, The Huffington Post UK, February–2015. ↢
31.: Laura Stampler, “Match.Com’s 2014 Singles in America Survey: What Emoji Say About Sex”, Time, February–2015. ↢
32.: Mary Bowerman, “Emoji Users More Likely to Have Sex, Survey Finds”, USA Today, February–2015. ↢
33.: Justin R. Garcia, “So Emojional{\ldots} Why U.S. Singles Use Emojis”, Match.Com, 2015. ↢
34.: Caitlin Dewey, “Using More Emoji Does Not Mean you’ll Have More Sex {>}:-(”, The Washington Post, February–2015. ↢
35.: “Happy National Orgasm Day!”, Match.Com, 2015. ↢
36.: Darcy Raymond, “Swipe Right for (Love)”, MacEwan University Student Research Proceedings, 2017. ↢
37.: Emma Finamore, “The More Emojis You Use, the More Sex You Have”, The Independent, February–2015. ↢
38.: John-Michael Bond, “A Beginner’s Guide to Sexting With Emoji”, The Daily Dot, December–2016. ↢
39.: Benjamin Zimmer, Jane Solomon, and Charles Carson E, “Among the New Words”, May–2016. ↢
40.: Amanda Holpuch, “Instagram Ban on Emoji Has Sexters Searching for Fruity Alternatives”, The Guardian, April–2015. ↢
41.: Chitra Ramaswamy, “Real Life Emoji Sexting: Would You Post Someone an Aubergine?”, The Guardian, March–2016. ↢
42.: Durex Global, “#BreakingNews: We’re Launching an Exciting New Savoury #condom Range - Eggplant Flavour! ? #CondomEmoji”, Twitter, September–2016. ↢
43.: Arjun Kharpal, “Durex Announced an Eggplant Flavored Condom for a Very Serious Reason”, CNBC, September–2016. ↢
44.: Hamdan Azhar, “How We Really Use The Peach”, Emojipedia, September–2016. ↢
45.: Charlie Warzel, “Emojis Are Becoming Hyper-Realistic And That Is A Bad Thing”, BuzzFeed News, November–2016. ↢
46.: Elizabeth Narins, “People Are Panicking About the New Peach Emoji Because It Doesn’t Look Like a Butt”, Cosmopolitan, November–2016. ↢
47.: EJ Dickson, “Apple’s Peach Emoji No Longer Looks Like a Butt”, Glamour, November–2016. ↢
48.: Julie Gerstein, “Apple Brought The Peach Butt Emoji Back, Thank God”, BuzzFeed News, November–2016. ↢
49.: Romain Dillet, “Apple Brings Back the Peach Butt Emoji”, TechCrunch, 2016. ↢
50.: Lydia Dishman, “The Business Etiquette Guide To Emojis”, Fast Company, July–2016. ↢
51.: Mark Di Stefano, “Julie Bishop Describes Serious Diplomatic Relationships With Emoji”, BuzzFeed News, February–2015. ↢
52.: “Patrick Stewart to Voice Poo Emoji in The Emoji Movie”, The Guardian. ↢
53.: Crimesider Staff, “Autumn Klein Update: Robert Ferrante, Pittsburgh Medical Researcher, Accused of Poisoning Doctor Wife With Cyanide”, CBS News, July–2013. ↢
54.: Steve Helling, “Dr. Robert Ferrante Accused of Killing His Wife, Dr. Autumn Klein”, People, November–2013. ↢
55.: “Pittsburgh Scientist Charged over wife’s Cyanide Death”, BBC News, July–2013. ↢
56.: Lacey E. Spears, “My Sweet Angel Is In The Hospital For The 23rd Time :( Please Pray He Gets To Come Home Soon...”, Twitter, November–2009. ↢
57.: “Defense in Case of Woman Accused of Poisoning Son With Salt Faces Uphill Battle, Legal Experts Say”, May–2015. ↢
58.: “Emojis As Evidence: Recent Developments”, Berkeley Technology Law Journal, 2015. ↢
59.: Associated Press, “Lacey Spears, Who Killed Son With Salt, Gets Leniency in Sentencing”, New York Times, April–2015. ↢
60.: Ryan Broussard, “Text Message Helps Detectives Find Suspect in Shooting”, The Advocate, July–2014. ↢
61.: Katie Zavadski, “Brooklyn Teen Arrested for Emoji-Laden Threats Against NYPD”, New York. ↢
62.: Kevin Sullivan, “Three American Teens, Recruited Online, Are Caught Trying to Join the Islamic State”, Washington Post, December–2014. ↢
63.: Benjamin Weiser, “At Silk Road Trial, Lawyers Fight to Include Evidence They Call Vital: Emoji”, New York Times. ↢
64.: Ephrat Livni, “An Israeli Judge Ruled in That Emojis Show Intent for Legal Purposes”, Quartz, May–2017. ↢
65.: Ido Kenan, “[Emoji] Show Intention to Rent Apartment, Says Judge”, Room 404, 2017. ↢
66.: Joe Gyan, “Grand Jury Takes No Action in Baton Rouge Murder Case, Suspect to Be Set Free”, The Advocate, October–2014. ↢
67.: Holly Richmond, “Should Emoji Hold Up in Court?”, Center for Digital Ethics & Policy, 2015. ↢
68.: Sam Thielman, “Silk Road Operator Ross Ulbricht Sentenced to Life in Prison”, The Guardian, May–2015. ↢
69.: Jeremy Burge, “Google Updates Gun Emoji”, Emojipedia Blog, 2018. ↢
70.: Eli Hager, “Is an Emoji Worth 1,000 Words?”, The Marshall Project, 2015. ↢
71.: “Emojis As Evidence: Recent Developments”, Berkeley Technology Law Journal, 2015. ↢
72.: Rebecca Berels, “Take Me Seriously: Emoji As Evidence”. ↢
73.: Michael Gold, “Does This Look Right to You? HOLLA?D TONNEL”, New York Times, December–2018. ↢
74.: “History - Holland Tunnel”, The Port Authority of NY & NJ. ↢
75.: Jen Maxfield, “Port Authority Moves Holland Tunnel Wreaths After Majority of Commuters Vote for Change”, NBC New York, December–2018. ↢

*

In a gratifying coincidence, Bishop’s birthday takes place on July 17 — which is the date of World Emoji Day,16 as founded by Jeremy Burge, the mastermind behind Emojipedia. Burge chose the date in reference to Apple’s calendar emoji (📅), which itself commemorates the launch of Apple’s iCal calendar app.17

As an aside, this series owes an enormous amount to Burge’s site. Short only of certain Unicode minutiae, Emojipedia is the emoji reference source. It’s well worth a few moments of your time to have a look around. ↢

†

See Emojipedia for the full list. ↢

‡

Caitlin Dewey of the Washington Post was one of the few columnists to point out that correlation does not equal causation, and that increased emoji use did not necessarily lead to increased sexy times.34 ↢

§

Mind you, in 2017 a psychology student named Darcy Raymond studying at MacEwan University in Edmonton, Canada, found that emoji use in dating profiles correlated with a lower perceived intelligence on the part of the profile’s owner. You win some, you lose some.36 ↢

Emoji, part 4: who owns emoji?

November 10, 2018

As emoji become ever more ingrained in our online lives, the question asks itself: who decides which emoji we can type? As we learned last time, the answer is the Unicode Consortium, the body that oversees the lexicon of symbols with which computers communicate. Founded in California in 1991, the consortium, in its own words,

is a non-profit corporation devoted to developing, maintaining, and promoting software internationalization standards and data, particularly the Unicode Standard, which specifies the representation of text in all modern software products and standards.1

A noble aim indeed. But who’s behind the curtain?

As might be expected from its origins in Silicon Valley, Unicode’s voting members — that is, those with the final say on which characters will enter the Unicode standard — skew heavily towards big tech companies such as Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and IBM. The German software company SAP is a rare non-American outlier; the Chinese telecoms giant Huawei is rarer still as the only voting company whose home country does not use the Latin alphabet. Rounding out these tech heavyweights are a pair of typographic specialists, Adobe and Monotype.2

There are also a number of non-commercial voting entities, and here things get more interesting. The governments of Oman, Bangladesh, India and Tamil Nadu, one of India’s constituent states, each spend between $12,000 and $18,000 per year for voting rights.2,3* Oman, which joined in 2015, spins its membership as a way to help promote Arabic script culture; more concretely, it wishes that Unicode would fix the way it encodes certain Qur’anic characters.5,6 Bangladesh and India, both of whom became members in 2010, make the case for better support for the scripts of the Indian subcontinent: some Bengali letters are cumbersome to use, for example, while Unicode’s treatment of Indic scripts in general has attracted criticism for a variety of technical reasons.7,8 Tamil Nadu joined a year later, partly to encourage Unicode to improve its approach to Tamil and partly to needle the federal Indian government, with which it had an ongoing feud about Tamil encoding.9 Yet another Indian state, Andhra Pradesh, was a member from 2011 to 2014, when it hoped to boost the profile and the interoperability of its own script, Telugu.10,5

Now, a cynic might look at all this and wonder: are India and the Arabian Peninsula blessed with community-minded governments who have joined up out of the goodness of their hearts? Or is it conceivable, perhaps, that Unicode may not always have been the best steward of non-Latin scripts? Unicode has also come under fire in China, Japan and the Korean Peninsula as the standard-bearer for “CJK unification”, a somewhat controversial effort to reduce the number of characters required to represent those regions’ closely-related scripts.11,12 CJK unification is driven by the Ideographic Rapporteur Group, a separate but related body, but Unicode’s rubber-stamping of the IRG’s work has opened it up to collateral damage all the same.13

These are the problems that arise when a small group of people — however well-informed they are, and however disinterested they try to be — take charge of the lingua franca of the world’s computers. And unfortunately for Unicode, emoji have only widened the scope for criticism.

As we saw last time, the Unicode Consortium’s core mission is to assign a unique number to each and every character that forms part of human writing. With the glyphs in Unicode 1.0 drawn from a collection of existing character sets such as the USA’s ASCII, Japan’s Shift-JIS, and (my personal favourite), the USSR’s spellbinding GOST 10859-64, or Alphanumerical Codes for Punchcards and Punchtapes,14 the question has since become: which new characters should be admitted?

For a textual character, such as we might find in the body of an email or the text of a book, the price of entry is relatively low. It must already be in use, and it must be a single indivisible character. Imagine, for instance, that you want to be able to type in the fictitious (and awesome) character g̈ with a single keystroke on any one of the millions of Unicode-compliant devices around the world. You submit a proposal to Unicode — and they summarily reject it, because no language in the world actually uses g̈. Even if your beloved g-umlaut did exist in the wild, Unicode would reject it all the same because it can already be created by combining the existing LATIN SMALL LETTER G (g) and COMBINING DIAERESIS ( ̈) characters.15†

When it comes to what we might call symbols — characters that live alongside our text but are not entirely of a piece with it — things get a little more complicated. The symbols in Zapf Dingbats and other pi fonts were grandfathered into Unicode 1.0 without a great deal of scrutiny, but the consortium has since become more choosy and today any proposed symbol will be evaluated against a litany of criteria. Is it already in use within computer applications? Is it in common use within an active community? Is its meaning fixed and understood? Can it be used within plain text? (Emoji can, for instance, whereas traffic signs cannot.) Is it part of a group of related symbols? Does it fill a gap in the Unicode standard? There is an equally long list of reasons for rejection. Is the symbol trademarked? Is it typically used in standalone contexts (such as the aforementioned road signs) rather than in running text? Does it occur more in handwritten text than within computer applications? Does it lack a supportive community?16 And so on.

Shigetaka Kurita’s emoji are certainly symbols, as Unicode understands them, and they meet almost all of the positive requirements while simultaneously avoiding most of the negative ones. As such, when Google asked for their admission into the standard, there was little debate. Yet emoji differ from other symbols in one important way: they are constantly changing, both in meaning and in number. And this is problematic for Unicode because, per the consortium’s own guidelines, a symbol that is “part of a set undergoing rapid changes” will normally be rejected.16 As the character set of record, Unicode prefers new additions to be fully baked before incorporating them.

Emoji’s uncertain status is one that Unicode has brought upon itself. In the four years between Unicode 6.0, when emoji first made their way into the standard, and the publication in 2014 of Unicode 7.0,17 the organisation largely ignored emoji. Only two new emoji glyphs were introduced in 2014: SLIGHTLY SMILING FACE and SLIGHTLY FROWNING FACE, intended mostly to complete the familiar airport-bathroom satisfaction spectrum of “😊”, “🙂”, “🙁” and “☹️”.18 In 2015, however, just a year later, the newly-minted Unicode 8.0 incorporated no fewer than forty-one new emoji. Among them were new smileys (🤑, 🤒, 🙄); animals (🦁, 🦀); places of worship (🕍, 🕋, 🕌); sports (🏏, 🏓); and many more besides.19 It heralded a sea-change in how Unicode treated emoji, the fallout from which the organisation is still learning how to handle.

Shortly after release of Unicode 7.0 and its paltry brace of new smileys, Mark Davis and Peter Edberg, respectively the consortium’s president and technical director, circulated a memo addressing the state of emoji. They wrote:

Emoji characters have become extremely popular. Yet the choice of emoji to be represented in Unicode has left many people confused or disappointed.20

They were not wrong. Emoji had spread far and wide since their debut in 2010, but it was apparent that users were dissatisfied with the icons on offer. Moreover, as Davis and Edberg explained, users were bamboozled by the seeming arbitrariness of the emoji on their keyboards — not to mention the basic unfairness of it, too.

To start with, there was a preponderance of Japan-related glyphs such as bullet trains (🚅), creatures from Japanese folklore (👹, 👺), cultural symbols (🎑, 🎍, 🎎) and more, all at the expense of similar icons for other countries. Professions such as construction worker, police officer and dancer (👷, 👮, 💃) were depicted as stereotypically male or female and, similarly, a number of emoji depicting couples and families hewed to heterosexual norms (💏, 👪). Nor was there any variation in skin tone. Emoji’s smiley faces and tiny human figures were drawn with deliberately unreal yellow skin, but it was clear that there were no dark-skinned emoji to be found. Lastly, people just wanted more emoji: Edberg and Davis cited articles from BuzzFeed, NYMag and Business Insider in which, they said, there was “some surprising consistency” among the asked-for symbols.20

All this prompted Unicode to take the unprecedented step of opening up the standard to wholly new emoji, a luxury denied to all other types of symbol before and since. In the run-up to the publication of Unicode 8.0, Edberg and Davis themselves put forward a host of new emoji in the hope of filling some of the most egregious gaps in the standard. Among their new symbols were non-Japanese sports such as cricket (🏏), ice hockey and field hockey (🏒, 🏑), table tennis (🏓) and badminton (🏸);17 foods items such as a taco (🌮), a champagne bottle (🍾), and a wedge of cheese (🧀), all of which had been mooted in magazine articles and publicity campaigns;17 and, more significantly, five “selector” characters that changed the skin tone of existing emoji (🏻, 🏼, 🏽, 🏾 and 🏿).17 From Shervin Afshar of HighTech Passport Ltd and Roozbeh Pournader of Google came an accompanying proposal for religious symbols such as prayer beads (📿), the Kaaba (🕋), a synagogue (🕍) and others.17

The result was a dramatically expanded set of emoji in Unicode version 8.0, formally approved in June 2015 and available on smartphones and computers later that year.19 The floodgates were open.

In this brave new world of user-submitted emoji, a new glyph may be accepted into Unicode if it fills an obvious gap (as in the sports listed above); if the Unicode Consortium thinks it will be popular, based on hashtag usage or other social media barometers; or, lastly, if the consortium knows it will be popular because so many people are asking for it. Corporate emoji, those that are too general or too specific, and those that are likely to be passing fads are rejected.21

What this means is that emoji are now subject to a kind of directed, and occasionally misdirected, evolution. Most simply, any sufficiently motivated individual can make the case for their own personal hobby horse. Erstwhile New York Times journalist Jennifer 8. Lee did just that in proposing the dumpling emoji (🥟), a globally-recognised food whose absence was one of emoji’s many cultural blindspots.22 When radio producer Mark Bramhill lobbied for PERSON IN LOTUS POSITION (🧘), on the other hand, he did so not out of altruism but rather to provide material for an episode of a popular design podcast called 99% Invisible.23‡ Similarly equivocal motives abound on the part of those companies who ask their customers to lobby for new emoji on their behalf. Taco Bell ran a textbook crowdsourcing campaign in which it exhorted its patrons to tweet in support of a taco emoji (🌮), which was ultimately added to Unicode 8.0;24 Durex, on the other hand, failed to raise the same level of support for a condom emoji.25

Non-profits, too, often see emoji as an alternative to traditional advertising. In 2016, a Catalan cultural group petitioned WhatsApp to add an emoji for the traditional Catalunyan porrón, or wine flask, failing to realise that the Unicode Consortium would have been a better bet.26§ Elsewhere, Scotland, England, and Wales recently received their own regional flag emoji (🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿, 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 and 🏴, although operating system support is still patchy󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿) after a rather more successful proposal by Owen Wilson, a Welsh journalist.27 And corporate sponsorship and regional boosterism collided when Spanish food company Fallera enlisted a comedian named Eugeni Alemany to promote a paella emoji. The boisterous #PaellaEmoji campaign that ensued persuaded Unicode to approve it, but the resultant SHALLOW PAN OF FOOD emoji (🥘) put a few noses out of joint when Apple’s version did not display the traditional ingredients of rabbit, green beans, and garrafó beans.28

This last case illustrates another way in which emoji differ from other characters. If, having convinced the Unicode Consortium to approve your emoji, you will likely have little say in how it looks when it appears in the wild. In an ideal world, this would not be a problem — after all, how many type designers disagree on what the letter “A” should look like? — but emoji evolve so quickly that nothing can be taken for granted. In 2016, for instance, Apple decided to revise its PISTOL emoji so that it resembled a water pistol rather than a real gun. For two years, Apple’s “🔫” was at odds with the realistic guns depicted by more or less all of its competitors — until a collective change of heart in 2018 saw all of the other pistol emoji updated to match.29 Elsewhere, for a long time Samsung’s CROSSED FLAGS emoji (🎌) displayed Korean rather than the usual Japanese flags30 and, infamously, for most of 2014, Google’s YELLOW HEART (💛) incongruously presented itself as a pink, hairy heart.31 Unicode is a standard; emoji are not.

Today, Unicode finds itself at a crossroads. For most of the consortium’s twenty-seven–year history, its users — that is to say, us, the great unwashed of the internet — rarely gave text encoding a second thought. We typed our emails and text messages and read our web pages without worrying too much about how our letters and words were stored or communicated. That isn’t to say that computer manufacturers and software vendors were not jumping through hoops to make it all work, but nowadays, thanks to Unicode, the situation is much improved. As of October 2018, more than nine out of every ten websites use Unicode and mojibake, or garbled characters, are largely a thing of the past.32

With the advent of emoji, however, and particularly since the Great Emoji Expansion of ’14|| the public are paying a great deal more attention. Unicode’s yearly cadence of new versions brings with it “emoji season”, in which commentators critique the new emoji that will shortly appear on their computers, tablets and smartphones.33,34,35 Not all of this attention is positive (the Unicode Consortium has been criticised for its pale, male and stale membership; emoji for its cultural biases and lack of representation) but the limelight has encouraged the consortium to remake itself, and the little picture-characters it controls, in a more equitable light.

There are even whispers that Unicode would be happier to get out of the emoji business entirely so that it might rededicate itself to the job of encoding the world’s writing systems, but that is a story for another article. For now, it is enough to say that whatever the future holds, the 🧞 is out of the bottle and there is little prospect of it going back in.

1.: “The Unicode Consortium”, Unicode.Org, 2018. ↢
2.: “Unicode Members”, Unicode.Org, 2018. ↢
3.: “Membership Levels and Fees”, Unicode.Org, 2018. ↢
4.: “Script Encoding Initiative”, UC Berkeley Department of Linguistics, 2018. ↢
5.: “Unicode Consortium Membership History”, Unicode.Org, 2018. ↢
6.: Sheera Frenkel, “Why Is This Random Gulf Country Helping Pick Your Emojis?”, BuzzFeed News, 2016. ↢
7.: Aditya Mukerjee, “I Can Text You A Pile of Poo, But I Can’t Write My Name”, Model View Culture, 2015. ↢
8.: Jeroen Hellingman, “Indian Scripts and Unicode”, 1998. ↢
9.: Liat Berdugo, “Two Days With the Shadowy Emoji Overlords”, Rhizome, 2015. ↢
10.: “Telugu Joins Unicode Consortium As Full Member”, The Hindu, 2011. ↢
11.: Mirai No Moji kōdo Taikei Ni Watakushitachi Wa Fuan O Motteimasu, 1993. ↢
12.: Zhou Jing, “Combat over Chinese Character Unification”, china.org.Cn, 2008. ↢
13.: Ken Whistler, “Unicode Technical Note #26: On the Encoding of Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, and Han”, Unicode.Org, 2010. ↢
14.: “Source Standards and Specifications”, Unicode.Org, 2018. ↢
15.: “Submitting Character Proposals”, Unicode.Org, 2016. ↢
16.: “Criteria for Encoding Symbols”, Unicode.Org, 2016. ↢
17.: Unknown entry ↢
18.: Karl Pentzlin, “L2/10-429: Proposal to Encode Three Additional Emoticons”, 2010. ↢
19.: Jeremy Burge, “Unicode Version 8.0”, Emojipedia. ↢
20.: Peter Edberg and Mark Davis, “L2/14-172R: Proposed Enhancements for Emoji Characters: Background”, 2014. ↢
21.: “Submitting Emoji Character Proposals”, Unicode.Org, 2018. ↢
22.: Charlie Wurzel, “One Woman’s Bizarre, Delightful Quest To Change Emojis Forever”, BuzzFeed News, 2016. ↢
23.: Mark Bramhill, “Person in Lotus Position”, 99% Invisible, 2017. ↢
24.: Taco Bell, “The Taco Emoji Needs to Happen”, change.Org, 2014. ↢
25.: Durex Global, “#BreakingNews: We’re Launching an Exciting New Savoury #condom Range - Eggplant Flavour! ? #CondomEmoji”, Twitter, September–2016. ↢
26.: Sam Jones, “’A Symbol of Our land’: Catalan Group Pitches WhatsApp porrón Emoji”, The Guardian, August–2016. ↢
27.: “Wales Flag Emoji Finally Arrives on Twitter”, BBC News, 2017. ↢
28.: Sarah Miller, “The Secret History of the Paella Emoji”, Food & Wine, 2017. ↢
29.: Jeremy Burge, “Google Updates Gun Emoji”, Emojipedia Blog, 2018. ↢
30.: Jeremy Burge, “Samsung Puts Japan Back on the Map”, Emojipedia Blog, 2017. ↢
31.: John-Michael Bond, “You May Be Accidentally Sending Friends a Hairy Heart Emoji”, Engadget, 2014. ↢
32.: “Usage Statistics of Character Encodings for Websites”, W3Techs, 2018. ↢
33.: Jeremy Burge, “Issue 26 — Emoji Action Season”, Emoji Wrap, 2018. ↢
34.: “Drunk? Anaesthetised? Or Just Seen Your Bank Balance? – What the New Woozy Emoji Really Means”, The Guardian, November–2018. ↢
35.: Amelia Heathman, “World Emoji Day 2018: First Look at New Apple Emoji in IOS 12 Update”, Evening Standard, October–2018. ↢

*: The University of California, Berkeley, also stumps up the cash for a vote, albeit with an educational discount. Its involvement centres around the work of the Script Encoding Initiative, an ongoing project to encode scripts that are not yet in the Unicode standard.4 ↢
†: By convention, Unicode character names are given in upper case. ↢
‡: Full disclosure: I’ve contributed to two episodes of 99% Invisible. ↢
§: WhatsApp duly declined, citing their inability to do actually do anything about the request. ↢
||: I am trying to make this A Thing. ↢

Emoji, part 3: go west

October 14, 2018

In 2011, Apple became the first big tech company in the West to visibly embrace emoji. The detailed, glossy symbols that appeared that year on the iPhone’s on-screen keyboard were a far cry from Shigetaka Kurita’s lo-fi efforts and they went on to become the de facto standard for modern emoji design. But though Apple holds the emoji 👑, it was Gmail, Google’s email service, that had first dragged emoji out of Japan and onto the world stage. And drag it had to, for emoji did not come quietly.

In the mid-2000s, as Google sought to expand its reach in Asia, it prepared to make Gmail, its email service, available to users in Japan. Emoji were as unfamiliar outside their native country as they were beloved inside it,* but Takeshi Kishimoto, product manager for Google in Japan, knew that a successful launch would depend on their inclusion. His bosses agreed in principle but balked at one symbol in particular: Takeshi was adamant that Gmail must include a poo emoji.2 Promptly, the “💩” hit the fan.

The poop emoji was based on a character from a 1980s anime series called Dr. Slump. “Poop Boy” was one of a parade of poo-related characters in the series, appearing alongside “Manure Boy”, “Bird Poop Boy”, “Old Man Poop” and “Soft-Serve Ice Cream Boy” (whom the others mistake for a pile of faeces), and he went on to appear both in other anime series and a set of related video games.3 Poop Boy’s digital alter ego was introduced in 2000 by KDDI AU, one of NTT DOCOMO’s competitor networks,4 and it was embraced by younger users as a synonym for the word unchi, a childish exclamation meaning “poop” or “shit”. It was the visual equivalent of the word “doo-doo”, in other words, with all the earnest utility and gleeful mischief that implies.2 Users loved it — and Takeshi could prove that they loved it, showing his bosses a study that ranked “💩” as one of Japan’s most popular emoji.5 His appeal to the data won the day and the poop’s place in Gmail was assured.

But Google’s engineers faced another problem when implementing “💩” and its sibling emoji. Each of Japan’s mobile networks supported more or less the same set of emoji as the others, but the binary numbers that identified those emoji differed from one company to the next. Send a “📺” from your NTT cellphone to a friend on KDDI AU and they would see “💡”; your colleague on the SoftBank network, “🌄”. The result was what the Japanese called mojibake, or garbled characters.6 It was left to Google to cajole emoji into working across all of Japan’s mobile networks and Google, in turn, sought the help of an organisation called the Unicode Consortium.

Unicode’s roots stretch back to the 1980s. At that time, most computers understood only a limited set of characters, and the characters that they did understand were often specific to a single country or language. Opening a file that had been created on a computer in a different region often resulted in a mess of misinterpreted text — mojibake before emoji ever existed. Finally, in 1987, the leaders of multilingual computing projects at Apple and Xerox joined forces to develop a single universal character set they hoped would replace the era’s cacophony of regional standards. They called it “Unicode”.7

Since its incorporation in 1991, the Unicode Consortium’s cabal of engineers, linguists and government apparatchiks have worked to codify more or less all forms of writing known to humanity.7 The group’s achievements include such noble works as making the ancient Linear B alphabet available to scholars across the world; preserving archaic Egyptian Coptic for posterity; and enabling once-marginalised scripts such as Cherokee to flourish online. All this has been done by asking and answering the same question, over and over again: what number should be assigned to this character, that character, and the one after that?8

Now, fifteen years after the consortium’s founding, Google knocked on Unicode’s doors and asked these éminences grises of computerised language: “What number should we use for ‘💩’?”

Unicode was unfazed. In fact, the organisation had unwittingly made a head start on the task of encoding emoji thanks to a hangover from the old days of metal typesetting.

In part two we saw how some of the more flamboyant characters to appear on the printed page were under pressure from both cultural and technical factors. Printers and book buyers preferred a neat, clean page with few adornments and, upon its arrival in the late nineteenth century, the typewriter’s utilitarian keyboard made it incrementally harder to use such characters in the first place.

But that is not the whole story. Even under the combined assault of the QWERTY keyboard and the minimalist aesthetic of the modern book, special typographic characters never really went away. Many such marks survived in the typographic priest holes called “pi fonts” — collections of symbols too niche for mainstream typefaces but too useful to die out entirely. The origins of the term “pi font” are elusive, but it may come from the phenomenon of “printer’s pie”, where an inattentive worker knocks a page of movable type onto the floor in a jumbled mess.9 If true, it would be an appropriate label: the typical pi font is home to an oddball mix of mathematical and technical symbols (∑, √, ƒ, %, ‰, º and more), currencies ($, ¥, £ and so on), fractions (½, ⅓, ¼), and a generous smattering of ancient and medieval characters (¶, ☞, ❦).10

Typographic smileys in Carmen of the Golden Coast — Typographic smileys in the 1935/1936 edition Carmen of the Golden Coast by Madeline Brandeis. (Image courtesy of Jenny Kalahar.)

Some pi fonts harboured even rarer characters, as can be seen in the 1935 edition of Madeline Brandeis’s book Carmen of the Golden Coast.11 These are honest-to-God typographic smileys, printed thirty years before Harvey Ball got the credit for inventing them and sixty before Shigetaka Kurita immortalised them in pixels. Why are they here? As with typefaces in general, individual pi characters were occasionally commissioned for use in a particular work, and this may be how Carmen’s singular smileys came about. Certainly, this is the only pre-emoji printed work I’ve come across that contains “🙂” and “😭︎” as individual glyphs, which suggests that these were one-offs. Even Little Tom of England, a similar book by the same author, published a year earlier, lacks them.12 But tempting as it is to draw a line of descent from Brandeis’s printed book to Kurita’s electronic icons, the evidence is not there to support it.

Even so, pi fonts can rightly claim a role in emoji’s emergence on the world stage. When Apple unveiled its LaserWriter printer in 1985, as a companion to 1984’s Macintosh computer,13 it came with a set of built-in fonts selected by none other than the company’s chairman, Steve Jobs. Three of those fonts came from the International Typeface Corporation, or ITC — a big win for the then-young type foundry — and two of those ITC fonts were products of a renowned type designer named Hermann Zapf. The first, Zapf Chancery, was designed to convey a handwritten feel (it was the only such “script” font that Jobs could bear to put on the Mac); the second, Zapf Dingbats, was a good old-fashioned pi font containing hundreds of miscellaneous symbols such as stars (✯), arrows (➽), crosses (✞), snowflakes (❄) and aeroplanes (✈).14 Together, the Mac and the LaserWriter brought high-quality printing to the masses and Zapf’s typefaces became mainstays of desktop publishing.

Characters comprising the first part of Zapf Dingbats. — The first part of Hermann Zapf’s Zapf Dingbats typeface, as featured in issue 2 of volume 5 of U&lc magazine. (Courtesy of Monotype ITC Inc. ITC and Zapf Dingbats are trademarks of Monotype ITC Inc. registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and may be registered in certain other jurisdictions.)

In 1991, then, when the Unicode Consortium published their first stab at a standard character set, a keen-eyed reader† would have noticed the inclusion of a sequence of characters taken directly from Zapf Dingbats. To create Unicode 1.0, the consortium had simply selected what it considered to be the most common extant character sets and typefaces, resolved the most obvious conflicts, and unified them into a single all-encompassing character set.15 Zapf Dingbats’ hallowed place in the Apple ecosystem and beyond meant that it was one of those industry standards, and so in it went. Another section in Unicode 1.0, “Miscellaneous Dingbats”, augmented Zapf’s symbols with yet more glyphs such as chess pieces (♛), warning symbols (☣, ☢, ☠), musical notes (♫, ♬), playing card suits (♠, ♣, ♥, ♦) — and a pair of smiling and frowning faces (☺, ☹).16

Thus, when Google came to Unicode a decade later, looking to standardise a disparate collection of emoji, Unicode had seen it all before. Aeroplanes? Hearts? Pointing hands? Smiling faces? Why yes, said Unicode, we’re way ahead of you.

Characters comprising the second and third parts of Zapf Dingbats — The second and third parts of Hermann Zapf’s Zapf Dingbats typeface, as featured in issue 2 of volume 5 of U&lc magazine. (Courtesy of Monotype ITC Inc.)

Emoji’s admission into the Unicode standard, progressing as it did through layer after layer of discussion, procedure and committee, was slow but steady. The first formal step was taken in 2006, when Unicode co-founder Mark Davis (late of Apple; now at Google) proposed that the organisation take a look at Japan’s popular picture-writing symbols, explaining that:

There are a number of symbol sets that are in widespread use, but currently can only be mapped to private use characters on input. The UTC [Unicode Technical Committee] should consider whether or not it would be useful to encode these, or some subset.17

Davis did not mention emoji explicitly, but his meaning was clear and the ball was set rolling. A first draft of a unified emoji character set followed in 2007,18 and in 2010, the publication of Unicode 6.0 made it official: 722 emoji were added to the more than 100,000 other characters then in the standard.‡ Thanks to Zapf Dingbats and the other pi fonts on which Unicode had been founded, 114 of those emoji were already present.19

Finally, Google could add emoji to Gmail without worrying that its users would suffer from the dreaded mojibake. And where emoji went, so followed the poop: Gmail’s unchi emoji was an evocative, faceless turd surrounded by circling flies, its scatalogical impact blunted only by its diminutive 15-pixel-square dimensions.2 Moreover, the poop emoji and its kind were now free to roam the internet at large. First Apple, then Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter and many others followed Google in adding support for emoji to their applications, web pages and operating systems. Emoji had gone global, and it has not looked back since.

This article is available in Portuguese at Época magazine.

1.: “Search for ‘emoji’ Between 1999 and 2006”, Google Scholar. ↢
2.: Lauren Schwartzberg, “The Oral History Of The Poop Emoji (Or, How Google Brought Poop To America)”, Fast Company, 2014. ↢
3.: “Poop-Boy”, Dragon Ball Wiki. ↢
4.: Caitlin Harrington, “Origin of a Feces: A Not-So-Brief History of the Poop Emoji”, Wired, 2017. ↢
5.: Jeff Blagdon, “How Emoji Conquered the World”, The Verge, 2013. ↢
6.: Ritchie King, “Will Unicode Soon Be the Universal Code? [The Data]”, July–2012. ↢
7.: Laura Wideburg, “Early Years of Unicode”, Unicode.Org, 1998. ↢
8.: “What Is Unicode?”, Unicode.Org. ↢
9.: Richard Eckersley, “Pi Font”, Glossary of Typesetting Terms, 1994. ↢
10.: “Pi Characters”, PrintWiki. ↢
11.: Madeline Brandeis, Carmen of the Golden Coast, 1936. ↢
12.: Madeline Brandeis, Little Tom of England, 1935. ↢
13.: Jason O’Grady D, “Technology Timeline”, in Apple Inc., 2009, 72-75. ↢
14.: Ilene Strizver, “The Story Behind Zapf Chancery”, Fonts.Com. ↢
15.: The Unicode Consortium, “1.0 Introduction”, in Unicode Standard, Version 1.0, 1991, 1-6. ↢
16.: The Unicode Consortium, “3.2 Symbols”, in Unicode Standard, Version 1.0, 1991, 72-97. ↢
17.: Mark Davis, “L2/06-369: Symbols”, Unicode.Org, 2006. ↢
18.: Kat Momoi, Mark Davis, and Markus Scherer, “L2/07-257: Working Draft Proposal for Encoding Emoji Symbols”, Unicode.Org, 2007. ↢
19.: Mark Davis and Peter Edberg, “Unicode Technical Standard #51: Unicode Emoji (version 11.0)”, Unicode.Org, 2018. ↢

*: A search for scholarly papers from the years 1999–2006 containing the word “emoji” returns only a handful of articles in English.1 ↢
†: And a persistent one: the standard spanned 682 printed pages and contained more than 28,000 characters.15 ↢
‡: More followed in 2012 and 2014, and the yearly cadence of new Unicode releases has since morphed into “emoji season” — but more on that in later parts. ↢

Emoji, part 2: what went before

September 16, 2018

As we saw in part 1, emoji did not arise in a vacuum. In designing his suite of icons, Shigetaka Kurita selected subjects that would be both recognisable and useful in the context of NTT DOCOMO’s new mobile internet service. Smiling faces (😊) and broken hearts (💔) conveyed emotion; trains (🚆) and planes (✈️) called up ticket booking services; videogame controllers (🎮) denoted mobile games; and so on. But the way in which emoji were and are presented — embedded among our letters and words while simultaneously being distinct from them — has always been as important as their content. In this respect, emoji owe as much to ancient scrolls, medieval books and typewriters as they do to pagers and mobile phones.

It feels redundant to say so, especially on a blog about punctuation, but the letters both of our alphabet and of others have never travelled alone. There have always been a select few non-alphabetic characters along for the ride. Some are functional, such as the marks of punctuation that form part of our written language; others are decorative; and still more live somewhere between the two extremes. In ancient Greece, for example, elaborate coronides marked the ends of books and poems.1 In Rome, K-shaped capitula, or “little heads”, signalled the start of each new section of a work and would later evolve into the pilcrow (¶), or paragraph mark. And both Greek and Roman scribes were partial to using hedera, or ivy leaves (❦), to break up lengthy passages.2

A bird-shaped *coronis* marks the end of a section of text in P.Lit.Lond. 134: Hyperides, In Philippidem. (Image taken from Classical texts from papyri in the British Museum; including the newly discovered poems of Herodas (1891), page 43.)

Later, as the paged codex supplanted the scroll, writers added yet more auxiliary marks such as asterisks (*), crosses (✠) and daggers (†)3,4 with which they organised footnotes and other asides. Some symbols were so important that it was the job of specialist scribes called “rubricators” to add them in contrasting red or blue ink after the fact.5 Readers, too, could not resist embellishing the page with their own marks, many of which took the form of little inky hands, or manicules (☞), that danced alongside the text to point out noteworthy passages.

Typographic hedera in Konrad Peutinger's Romanae Vetvstatis Fragmenta In Avgvsta Vindelicorvm Et Eivs Dioecesi — Typographic hedera in
Konrad Peutinger’s Romanae Vetvstatis Fragmenta In Avgvsta Vindelicorvm Et Eivs Dioecesi, printed in 1505 by Erhard Ratdolt. Words are separated by wedge-shaped interpuncts that mimic ancient Roman inscriptions. (CC-BY-SA 3.0 image © Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel. Romanae Vetvstatis Fragmenta In Avgvsta Vindelicorvm Et Eivs Dioecesi [Conradus Peutinger].)

Some of these marks crossed over to the printed page, although the difficulties of printing in multiple colours meant that rubricators were still called in to add them by hand.5 The pilcrow (¶) was one such mark, inked into blank spaces left by the printer at the head of each paragraph. But when the growing tide of printed books started to outpace the abilities of rubricators to decorate them, the pilcrow fell by the wayside to leave behind the modern indented paragraph.6,7*

The pilcrow’s disappearance was symptomatic of a broader change in typographic sensibilities. Not only did mass production put rubricators out of business but, in the pursuit of readability, many printers favoured an aethetic style notable mostly for its lack of ornamentation. Gutenberg himself used only letters, abbreviations and a handful of punctuation marks for his pioneering 42-line Bible, for example,8 while the Venetian printer Aldus Manutius, active a few decades later, cemented the trend with a series of sparsely-decorated pocket-sized books that would set the tone for centuries to come.9

There was more trouble in store in the late nineteenth century when the invention of the typewriter dealt another blow to typographic sophistication. Conceived primarily as a tool for business, the typewriter’s QWERTY keyboard bore only letters, numbers, a few marks of punctuation and a dollar sign. Even the digits “0” and “1” were omitted: why waste the keys when the letters “O” and “I” would do just as well in their place?10,11 First, printers had deemed it recherché to use too many ornamental characters; now the typewriter made it impossible to type them in the first place.12 The era of the typographic special character seemed to be over.

As it happened, the arid environment of the typewriter keyboard was more fertile than it seemed. There might be no pointing fingers or ivy leaves immediately to hand, but the letters, numbers and symbols that remained could be combined to make entirely new designs. And so almost as soon as the typewriter had arrived, secretaries, stenographers and writers created the new medium of typewriter art, in which mundane typewritten characters became the raw material for increasingly creative graphic artworks.13

Typewritten portrait of Dorothy Gish — A typewritten portrait of actress Dorothy Gish made by Kenneth Taylor, an office boy at the Los Angeles Times, around 1919. (Image from Photoplay magazine, January-June 1919.)

By the early 1980s the QWERTY keyboard had become the interface to a new world of computers and networking, and typewriter art was along for the ride. Graphical user interfaces were still rare (Apple’s Lisa went on sale in 1983; the Mac a year later14,15) and computer users were accustomed to word processors, spreadsheets and games presenting themselves using only the ninety-five printable characters of the ASCII character set.16 (There was, inevitably, an accompanying fad for “ASCII pr0n” — titillating images composed of nothing more than the symbols on the computer keyboard.17 Who could have predicted that the internet would become a hotbed of such iniquitous material?)

It was into this text-only world that emoji’s first true ancestor was born. Comprising only a colon, a hyphen and a closing parenthesis, the emoticon, or :-), was perfectly designed to pierce the disinterested blankness of a CRT monitor. Granted, so-called emoticons have been discovered in many pre-digital sources, such as seventeenth century poems:

Tumble me down, and I will sit
Upon my ruins, (smiling yet:)
Tear me to tatters, yet I’ll be
Patient in my necessity.18

and transcriptions of Abraham Lincoln’s speeches:

…there is no precedent for your being here yourselves, (applause and laughter ;) and I offer, in justification of myself and you, that I have found nothing in the Constitution against.19

but these are almost certainly typographic missteps rather than intentional smileys. The consensus is that emoticons proper arrived in 1982 in response to a joke gone wrong on an electronic bulletin board at Carnegie Mellon University. We open the scene with a puzzle posed by CMU computer scientist Neil Swartz:

16-Sep-82 12:09    Neil Swartz at CMU-750R      Pigeon type question
This question does not involve pigeons, but is similar:
There is a lit candle in an elevator mounted on a bracket attached to the middle of one wall (say, 2" from the wall).  A drop of mercury is on the floor.  The cable snaps and the elevator falls. What happens to the candle and the mercury?

There followed a complaint that a mercury spill was no laughing matter, whether real or not. With tongues firmly in cheeks, Swartz and others took it upon themselves to discuss how such misunderstandings might be avoided in future. In the course of the debate, a colleague of Swartz’s named Scott Fahlman posted the immortal words:

19-Sep-82 11:44    Scott E  Fahlman             :-)
I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:

:-)

Read it sideways.  Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends.  For this, use

:-(

Enter the emoticon.

The genius of Fahlman’s suggestion lay in the fact that just about any image of a human face, however abstract, will provoke an emotional reaction on the part of the viewer. So elemental were Fahlman’s inventions that images just like them have been around for millennia: a 4,500-year-old carving found at Nîmes in France is claimed to be the world’s oldest smiley;20 a 1700 BCE urn discovered on the border between Turkey and Syria, daubed with a distinctive :), runs it a close second;21 and similar doodles appear everywhere from medieval manuscripts to comic books. Nor is the modern stereotype of a smiley face an especially new invention. Designed in 1963 by a graphic artist named Harvey Ball, the iconic yellow smiley (🙂 is the closest analogous emoji) has since been co-opted as a symbol for everything from Walmart ad campaigns to acid house record covers.22,23 Even Ingmar Bergman, the famously morose film director, got in on the smiley action. Of course, he chose a “frowny” instead, drawn in lipstick on a mirror in his 1948 film Port of Call: “☹”.24

A cheery face in the pages of a manuscript dated to the second half of the thirteenth century. (Conches-en-Ouche, Musée du verre, ms. 0007, f. 061.) — A cheery face in the pages of a manuscript dated to the second half of the thirteenth century. (CC BY-NC 3.0 image of Conches-en-Ouche, Musée du verre, ms. 0007, f. 061, courtesy of La Bibliothèque Virtuelle des Manuscrits Médiévaux.)

Unsurprisingly, then, Fahlman’s happy and unhappy faces struck a chord, spreading first to other universities and then out into the world at large. As they did so, they multplied. In a November 1982 message sent to a colleague at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, CMU’s James Morris expanded the lexicon:25†

(:-) for messages dealing with bicycle helmets
@= for messages dealing with nuclear war
<:-) for dumb questions
oo for somebody's head-lights are on messages
o>-<|= for messages of interest to women
~= a candle, to annotate flaming messages

All very creative, and faithful to the spirit of Fahlman’s own typewriter art writ small. But one of Morris’s emoticons in particular anticipated a problem that still vexes emoji users today: when one group of people control a medium, it is easy to marginalise people outside that group. The o>-<|= emoticon, for “messages of interest to women” was as blithely exclusionary then as the preponderance of male emoji has been until very recently.

Emoticons got their first major upgrade in 1986 in the form of kaomoji, or “face characters”. In that year, a Japanese message board user named Yasushi Wakabayashi began signing his posts with his online alias, “Wakan,” follwed by a creative assemblage of characters forming a face: (^ _ ^). Like Fahlman, Yasushi maintains a modest web page describing his part in the invention of kaomoji, where he explains that he wanted to make a smiley that could be immediately understood by all readers. In particular, he wanted his mark to be “right way up” so that readers would see it as a face without having to mentally rotate it through 90 degrees. Perhaps coincidentally, this means that both emoticons and kaomoji are aligned perpendicular to their native scripts: traditional emoticons lie at right angles to texts written in the Latin alphabet, while kaomoji spring from Japanese characters that are more often written from top to bottom.26

At first, only a few people understood what the collection of characters in Wakan’s signature were supposed to mean and today, as kaomoji grow ever more complex, they can still be difficult to decipher. The archetypal “shruggie” ( ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ), for example, is relatively straightforward, as is the gloriously unhinged “table flip” ( (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻ ), but others are not so easily parsed — consider ༼∗ღ۝ღ∗༽ (one of many kaomoji meaning “hunger”) or (#´∞｀∫)∫ (“slow clap”), for example.27 And yet, after a slow start, suddenly Yasushi’s kaomoji were everywhere in Japan, taking their place alongside Scott Fahlman’s smileys as the new emotional currency of the internet.

At least, that is, until 1999, when emoji crashed the party.

If it was not immediately apparent that NTT DOCOMO’s little icons were destined for great things, their graduation in 2007 to Google’s Gmail and then, a year later, to Apple’s iPhone made it clear that something important was afoot.28,29 Google searches for “emoji” crept upwards just as those for “emoticon” tailed off.30 A drumbeat of tech news articles told Western iPhone owners how to unlock the hitherto Japan-only icons on their keyboards.29 The fate of the emoticon had been sealed, and today the likes of :-), ;-P, :-(, and :-D have been almost completely replaced by “🙂”, “😜”, “🙁”, “😀” and more.

And yet emoji’s seemingly effortless rise was anything but. More on that next time.

This article is available in Portuguese at Época magazine.

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2.: Robert Bringhurst, “Hedera”, in The Elements of Typographic Style : Version 3.2, 2008, 311-. ↢
3.: M B Parkes, “The Technology of Printing and the Stabilization of the Symbols”, in, 1993, 50-64. ↢
4.: R A Sayce, “Compositorial Practices and the Localization of Printed Books, 1530–1800”, 1966. ↢
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6.: Andrew Haslam, “Articulating Meaning: Paragraphs”, in Book Design, 2006, 73-74. ↢
7.: Jan Tschichold and Robert Bringhurst, “Why the Beginnings of Paragraphs Must Be Indented”, in The Form of the Book: Essays on the Morality of Good Design, 1991, 105-9. ↢
8.: S Füssel, “Bringing the Technical Inventions Together”, in, 2005, 15-18. ↢
9.: “Aldus Manutius, Scholar-Printer (c.1445-1515)”, nls.Uk, May–2012. ↢
10.: C E Weller, “Home of First Typewriter”, in The Early History of the Typewriter, 1921, 20-21. ↢
11.: Christopher Latham Sholes, “Improvement in Type-Writing Machines. U.S. Patent 207,559.”, August–1878. ↢
12.: J L Bell, “Dash It All!”, Oz and Ends, March–2009. ↢
13.: Maria Popova, “A Visual History of Typewriter Art from 1893 to Today”, Brain Pickings, 2014. ↢
14.: Christoph Dernbach, “Apple Lisa”, Mac History, 2007. ↢
15.: Christoph Dernbach, “The History of the Apple Macintosh”, Mac History, 2011. ↢
16.: Vint Cerf, “RFC 20: ASCII Format for Network Interchange”, ed. Network Working Group, October–1969. ↢
17.: K Mey, Art and Obscenity, 2006. ↢
18.: Levi Stahl, “The First Emoticon?”, Ivebeenreadinglately, 2014. ↢
19.: Jennifer 8. Lee, “Is That an Emoticon in 1862?”, New York Times. ↢
20.: Danny Kringiel, “Millionen für Ein Lächeln”, Spiegel Online, 2011. ↢
21.: Zuhal Uzundere Kocalar, “Ancient Pot Discovery in Turkey Contests Smiley Origin”, Andalou Agency, 2017. ↢
22.: Jack Neff, “Walmart Brings Back the Smiley Face in Ads and in Store”, Ad Age, 2016. ↢
23.: Christian Bernard-Cedervall and Antonin Pruvot, “How Did the Smiley Face Became an Icon of Rave Culture?”, Trax, 2016. ↢
24.: Ingmar Bergman, “Port of Call”, 1948. ↢
25.: Scott Fahlman, “‘Joke’ Conversation Thread in Which the :-) Was Invented”, Scott E. Fahlman. ↢
26.: 若林泰志, “顔文字の起源 ({\^{}}_{\^{}})”. ↢
27.: “10,000+ Japanese Emoticons, Kaomoji, Text Faces & Dongers”, JapaneseEmoticons.Me. ↢
28.: Lauren Schwartzberg, “The Oral History Of The Poop Emoji (Or, How Google Brought Poop To America)”, Fast Company, 2014. ↢
29.: Arnold Kim, “IPhone 2.2 Includes Hidden Japanese Emoji Icons”, Mac Rumors, 2008. ↢
30.: “Emoticon, Kaomoji, Emoji”, Google Trends. ↢

*: You can read more about the pilcrow here at Shady Characters. ↢
†: I’ve also written previously in more detail about Fahlman’s invention. ↢