I came across a post last July on Emojipedia, in which Keith Broni* noted that Twitter, or X, had redesigned its PISTOL emoji. PISTOL had always been controversial: most online platforms started off with PISTOLs drawn as realistic firearms, but, over the course of the mid-2010s, most of them moved to toylike renderings of water pistols instead. Twitter had followed suit.
Last year, though, as Broni reported, Twitter’s water pistol was redrawn to show a realistic, if simplified, handgun. There doesn’t seem to have been a great deal of fanfare from Twitter itself, or any formal justification for why the change was made. Which is, perhaps, not a surprise, since Elon Musk fired Twitter’s PR team soon after he became CEO in 2022. There’s no-one left to announce anything.
Ordinarily, I would have dismissed this news as relatively small beer. Emoji are redesigned all the time, even if usually not in quite such a radical fashion. Moreover, Elon Musk has always been a contrarian, and his increasingly hard-right rhetoric† often seemed calculated more to enrage than to persuade — and was, as such, easy to ignore.
Now, though, as I witness the political turmoil gripping the USA, and I bear in mind that Elon Musk is one of its fiercest cheerleaders, I wonder if that small but significant change to a single emoji is more important than I once thought. When it’s published this July, Face With Tears of Joy will talk about how emoji can change appearances and meanings — and indeed, it takes the PISTOL as a case study — but Twitter’s mean-spirited update to ‘🔫’ is almost painfully relevant. The renewed presence of a realistic pistol emoji on an ailing but still relevant social network seems in hindsight to have been a harbinger of something much worse coming down the line.
In an attempt to lighten the mood, may I present a short extract from Yuyn Li’s short story, “Apostrophe’s Dream”, part of a collection called A Cage Went in Search of a Bird:
colon: Ah, yes, friends, let me remind you all: we have been discussing the pressing issue of relevance. We are, unlike letters and numbers, increasingly facing a fate of being misused, abused, and worse, rejected as being superfluous.
comma: Tell that to my Oxford cousin—he’s the most unflappable creature but that doesn’t help in his case. Half—no, more than half—of the world don’t even know of his existence these days.
Yes: this is indeed a conversation between punctuation marks, and I am not spoiling it too greatly if I tell you to expect the ellipsis, exclamation mark, period and other marks to weigh in too. Read the full story at The Dial!
Lastly, podcast fans should listen to this recent episode of Grammar Girl, entitled “Cancellation”. Mignon Fogarty, the host, explains why the American spellings of “cancellation” and “canceled” use a double and single l respectively, which is interesting enough in itself, but do hang around for the second part of the show, in which Mignon reads a short essay by Glenn Fleishman on the origins of the term “fine print”. It’s a fact-filled summary of more than four centuries of printing history.
Enjoy!