So far in this series weāve seen how emoji were created in Japan, how they made their way into the wider world, and who takes responsibility for them now theyāre free to range across our screens. Aside from mentions in a few tech news outlets, however, emojiās early life went largely unreported. The mainstream media prefers a juicier drama and, in this article, weāll take a look at some of the stories that have seen emoji riding high ā and low ā in the press.
It can feel like emoji have been around forever, but Googleās search trends tool pinpoints the surprisingly recent moment at which emoji caught š„: 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 Microsoftās ubiquitous āWingdingsā 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 (š) and SLIGHTLY FROWNING FACE (š).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 āEmojliā, 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 Unicodeās new emoji, Gray and Scott created a āComing soon!ā 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 āYoā (itself a hairās breadth from outright parody, Yoās only feature was the ability to exchange messages containing the word āYoā),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 columnistsā eyebrows after spending a day replying to tweets using only emoji.15* Fast Company ran an inadvertently Freudian āOral History of the Poop Emojiā,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 Japanās cultural exports of āmanga and anime, and, of course, emojisā.20 That same month, former Wimbledon champion Andy Murray raised the profile of Scotlandās wedding of the year ā that is, his own ā by posting a tweet about it comprising only emoji:21
šāššš ššš°ššššš«šššššš¹š·š„šš·š“ššššÆš¶š¤š¹š»š·šŗš©š¦š·š¹šøšŗšā¤ššš¤š¤š¤š¤š¤š¤š¤22
Also in April 2015, Snapchat, a zeitgeisty messaging service, modified its apps to use emoji to show relationships between users. āBest friendā relationships, where two users exchanged the bulk of their messages with each other, were labelled with āšā, one-sided relationships with āšļøā, ālove trianglesā with āš¬ā, 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.23ā 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 (š), while over in the UK, the BBC reported that emoji were āthe fastest growing form of language in historyā.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: āWe donāt want it to dieā; Scott: āWe just donāt want it to live eitherā).7 Alone among the big news outlets, Forbes and Business Insider lamented Emojliās 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. Kuritaās 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.33ā”
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 respondentsā favourite amorous emoji, such as āšā, āšā, and āšā.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 Dotās John-Michael Bond in his 2016 article A beginnerās guide to sexting with emoji, the modern descendants of Shigetaka Kuritaās little icons have become a godsend for horny internet users: TACO (š®), PEACH (š) and AUBERGINE (š) 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 (šÆ) and TULIP (š·) are viable alternatives, as is the rather more risquĆ© CAT FACE (š±). Correspondents who feel uncomfortable with an aubergine, so to speak, might choose to use a shrimp instead (š¤); or, if they prefer to keep things vegetarian, the once-popular BANANA (š).38
The aubergine stands out as mascot of the emoji sexual revolution to the extent that āšā has become almost wholly dissociated from real aubergines in favour of its saucy alternative meaning. Writing in the rarefied pages of Duke Universityās American Speech journal, lexicographers Ben Zimmer, Jane Solomon and Charles E. Carson trace its emergence as graphical slang for āpenisā as far back as 2011, barely a year after it first entered the emoji vocabulary.39 Its star has only risen since then. The aubergineās first big appearance in the public eye came in 2015, when the photo sharing service Instagram banned searches for āšā because it was a surefire way to find penis-related contraventions of the siteās 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 ā100% phallic. 100% anonymous. 100% disturbing.ā)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 aubergineās only real competition in the sexy-emoji-in-the-news stakes, but it hit a bum note in 2016. A glance at Emojipediaās visual history of the peach demonstrates that through the emoji ages, and across many emoji platforms, the shape of the āšā 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 ālikeā, āassā, āpeachā, ābadgirlā, and ābootyā, and that a mere 7% of tweets containing a āšā actually referred to the fruit itself.44 The peachās 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 āšā in a test version of iOS, its mobile operating system. The new, rounder and generally more believable āšā was part of a general overhaul of Appleās 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. āI, for one, am furiousā, wrote Charlie Warzel of Buzzfeed in an opus that bemoaned the neutering of the peach emoji as āthe worst kind of gentrification of the internetā.45 At Cosmopolitan, Elizabeth Narins considered that āshit has hit the fanā,46 while an unimpressed EJ Dickson of Glamour likened the new design to āone of those foamy Fisher Price balls your teachers made you use in gym class because they were afraid of getting sued by the parentsā.47 Appleās 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 āšā 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 āšā 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 āšā 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 Trekās Jean-Luc Picard, can voice a talking
āš©ā 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, āWill [the energy drink] stimulate egg production too?ā 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 Ferranteās manipulative use of a smiling face.53,54,55
The next criminal emoticon to appear in the news predated Ferranteās but was only reported in 2014, a year later, when another grim murder case went to trial. On November 29th, 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
Spearsās āSweet Angelā was her son Garnett, as her followers knew, but the sentiment in her tweet ā and its jarring emoticon ā 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. āItās a chess game,ā Christopher Levi Jackson wrote, āIām up two moves a head ⦠try again. Bang bang, bang.ā 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 ācaused New York City police to fear for their safetyā.61 Emoji were now grounds for arrest.
Emojiās criminal associations have only intensified since those first provocative salvos. In December 2014, for instance, papers reported that three Muslim siblings were arrested at Chicagoās OāHare 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 ā 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, Ulbrichtās defence lawyer successfully argued that emoji in his clientās 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 š Interested in the house šš»šÆāāļøāļøšæš¾ā¦ Just need to discuss the details⦠Whenās 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 Plaintiffās great reliance on the defendantsā 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 NYPDās complaint against Osiris Aristy was dismissed by a New York grand jury that decided āš«š„š„š„š®š«š«ā 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. Itās tempting to look at Aristyās cartoonish water pistols, for instance, and wonder why New Yorkās finest felt threatened in any way ā but in 2014, when Aristy posted the offending message, his āš«ā 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 Aristyās 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 emojiās 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 23rd, 2018, and it read:
Does This Look Right to You? HOLLAšD 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 tunnelās 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 first wreath fits neatly over the āOā in āHOLLANDā, 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 āAā, the Port Authority hangs it on the antagonistic āNā. (The second wreath is placed over the āUā in tunnel, which is certainly frustrating, but at least the āUā and the implied āOā 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 āHOLLAšD TONNELā headline. The Port Authority capitulated a few days after the Timesā 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 āAā 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.
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- āEmojiā, Google Trends, 2018.Ā ā¢
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- Jeremy Burge, āUnicode Version 8.0ā, Emojipedia.Ā ā¢
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- Charlie Warzel, āEmojis Are Becoming Hyper-Realistic And That Is A Bad Thingā, BuzzFeed News, Novemberā2016.Ā ā¢
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- 62.
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- 64.
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- 65.
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- 72.
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- 74.
- āHistory - Holland Tunnelā, The Port Authority of NY & NJ.Ā ā¢
- 75.
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- *
- In a gratifying coincidence, Bishopās birthday takes place on July 17 ā 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 Appleās calendar emoji (š
), which itself commemorates the launch of Appleās iCal calendar app.17
As an aside, this series owes an enormous amount to Burgeās site. Short only of certain Unicode minutiae, Emojipedia is the emoji reference source. Itās well worth a few moments of your time to have a look around.Ā ā¢
- ā
- See Emojipedia for the full list.Ā ā¢
- ā”
- 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.34Ā ā¢
- §
- 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 profileās owner. You win some, you lose some.36Ā ā¢
Comment posted by Bill M on
Thanks for the fine series on the emjoi. Iāve always looked at these as a bit of non-sensical clutter although I have used a few. I never knew how, where, or when they were developed. I thought they started as a play on the ascii generated characters and expanded to living color.
Nice work and all 5 parts are an interesting read.
Have a Great 2019!
Comment posted by Keith Houston on
Hi Bill — thanks for the comment. I’m glad you’re enjoying the emoji articles, and there are more to come!
Comment posted by Steve on
I enjoyed the series very much. However, I will not be using any emojis to indicate how much I enjoyed it. Sorry, Iām just old school. Thanks.
Comment posted by Keith Houston on
Hi Steve — thanks for the comment! No emoji necessary.
Comment posted by Garth on
The Duke University researchers could only trace back the aubergine as stand-in for “penis” to 2011 because they were looking at the wrong language! They’ve been a phallic symbol in Japan for a long time.
For all the media hype about emoji being a new “universal language”, this is the only example I can think of of cultural connotations making that sort of jump with an emoji; it’s more common for emoji to pick up entirely different connotations (and sometimes even denotations, in the case of the INFORMATION DESK PERSON being reinterpreted in the West as “sassy hair-flip” instead of “helpfully presenting information”).