Shady Characters

Links! It is high time for a few links. Let’s start out with some scholarly appetisers before a good old-fashioned moral panic as dessert.

First up, anthropologist Piers Kelly, writing in the pages of Sapiens magazine, has penned a simple but compelling tale of how the Vai script of Liberia was invented and brought to its modern-day state in less than two centuries. Piers digs into how the accelerated evolution of the Vai script might be used to understand the development of ancient writing systems such as hieroglyphs, cuneiform, and Chinese script. His article is called “What the Vai Script Reveals About the Evolution of Writing”, and it is well worth a read.

Over at Language Log, Victor Mair links to news of a huge discovery of ancient Chinese manuscripts in the form of bamboo slips. The original article is in Chinese, but Google provides the following translation, lightly edited for readability:

More than 3,200 bamboo slips have been rediscovered in the Warring States Chu Tomb at No. 798, Wangjiazui, Jingzhou, Hubei. Some of them are the first archaeological excavation of the Chu State manuscript “Confucius”, some are “Book of Songs”, and some are suspected to be unprecedented pre-Qin music scores. […] The Wangjiazui Warring States Chu Tomb dates back about 2,300 years ago and is located in Hongsheng Village, Jinan Town, Jingzhou District, Jingzhou City, Hubei Province. According to Xiao Yujun, the head of the archaeological project and director of the Archaeological Department of the Jingzhou Museum, in order to cooperate with the infrastructure project, the Jingzhou Museum conducted archaeological excavations at the cemetery from 2019 to 2021[.] A batch of bronze ware, lacquered wood ware and more than 3,200 bamboo slips (not counting small fragments) were collected.

If you’ve read The Book, you’ll know that the ancient Chinese often wrote on vertical slips of bamboo — a practice which, in turn, led to China’s characteristic top-to-bottom and right-to-left style of writing. I found it very difficult to locate images of bamboo slips for publication in The Book (ironically, the language barrier being the main stumbling block), so it’s gratifying to note that the original article has some decent photographs of the manuscripts found in the tomb.

Finally, the US Drug Enforcement Agency has recently taken an interest in emoji. As I discovered via Emoji Information on Twitter, the DEA has released a fact sheet aimed at parents, teachers, and other caregivers that purports to decipher “common emoji codes” for illicit drugs and related slang. Here they are:

Percocet and Oxycodone

💊 🔵 🅿 🍌

Xanax

💊 🍫 🚌

Adderall

💊 A-🚆

Meth

🔮 💙 💎 🧪

Heroin

🤎 🐉

Cocaine

❄ 🌨 ⛄ 💎 🎱 🔑 😛 🐡

MDMA & Mollies

❤ ⚡ ❌ 💊 🍬

Mushrooms

🍄

Cough syrup

🍇 💜 🍼

Marijuana

💨 🔥 🌴 🌲 😮💨 🍀

Dealer advertising

🤑 👑 💰 💵 🔌

High potency

🚀 💣 💥

Universal for drugs

🍁

Large batch

🍪

But wait! The DEA is behind the times on this. The phenomenon of emoji-as-drugs-slang seems to have been uncovered by BBC reporter Stacey Dooley in a 2017 programme entitled Stacey Dooley Investigates: Kids Selling Drugs Online. (Dooley’s findings were parroted by outlets such as the UK’s premier freesheet, the Metro, and salted with implied outrage into the bargain.) Many of the DEA’s terms were already in use at the time of Dooley’s investigation.

It’s worth noting, I think, that the DEA’s “emoji drug codes” are no more sinister or nefarious than slang words such as “snow” or “weed”. Once you know that ‘❄’ means “cocaine” and ‘🌴’ means “marijuana”, you have cracked the code. This isn’t to minimise the impact of illegal drug use, but I do think it’s a little unfair to single out emoji; one might equally well blame English for permitting individual words to have more than one meaning.

This has been your periodic emoji public service announcement. Please use drug emoji responsibly.

If I learned anything as I wrote about emoji, it is that emoji is as dynamic as any “real” language. Here’s a recent development that demonstrates exactly that.

From the latest edition of Jennifer Daniel’s always-entertaining newsletter, “Did Someone Say Emoji?”,* comes the news that Unicode is shutting down the pipeline of new flag emoji. Jennifer is the chair of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee, so this comes straight from the 🐴’s mouth.

This is not a small change. Flags are the largest homogenous subspecies of emoji, and a special one at that, with the Unicode Consortium careful to ensure that there is always an official flag emoji for each of the countries defined by the ISO 3166 standard. (There are also some non-country flags, but more about them later.) But despite this special status, there is a long list of reasons for the cauterisation of one of emoji’s major limbs.

First, and probably most obvious, is that international boundaries, politics, and identities are constantly in flux. Flags change, countries change; even whether a particular geographic entity is a country or not is sometimes a matter of perspective. Taiwan, of course, is the flag-bearer (sorry) for this particular type of disagreement: in order to prevent offence to one party or another, Taiwanese flag emoji do not appear on some devices.†

In the same vein, flags for “subdivisions” of countries — the UK’s home nations, the USA’s constituent states, and so on — can be equally problematic. Thus, although the Unicode standard technically supports subdivision flags, only a handful are officially blessed to appear as emoji: the flags of Scotland, England and Wales are uncontroversial enough to be supported on most platforms, but for Unicode to sanction a flag for Northern Ireland would be to wade into a political quagmire that has endured for more than a century. For another difficult case, consider Spain’s independence-minded region of Catalonia.

And then there are those flags that represent something other than countries and regions, and they can be just as troublesome. Should historical flags be supported, for example? Or organisational flags such as those of NATO or the UN? What about indigenous peoples, such as Australia’s Indigenous Peoples and New Zealand’s Maori, who have flags different to those of their colonisers? And what about the flags of such slippery things as movements, like the rainbow LGBT flag or the skull-and-crossbones of the pirate flag? Some of these have emoji flags, others do not, and it is not at all clear whether the correct choices have been made.

Beyond all this, Jennifer notes that flag emoji are just not very popular; the vertigo-inducing emojitracker, for instance, shows that not a single flag regularly cracks the top 100 emoji on Twitter. Such is the dearth of interest that, as Keith Broni points out over on Emojipedia, Microsoft Windows has never supported flag emoji. Every flag emoji sent to a Windows machine ends up as either a pair of “regional indicator symbol letters”, such as “🇺‌🇸” or “🇬‌🇧” or simply a featureless black flag (🏴).

In future, then, Unicode’s Emoji Subcommittee will not accept any new proposals for flags. There will still be new national flags from time to time, as the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency adds new entries to its more-or-less-canonical list of countries, but anything else is likely to be rejected out of hand. Fly your 🏴s at half mast: the book is closed on new emoji flags.

*

Crying out for an interrobang right there. ↢

†

Capitalise the ‘p’ in “party” and this sentence still makes sense. ↢