We’ve all been misinterpreting our smartphone emojis. It’s been one massive mix-up. Hours of painfully pecking away at your phone in order to communicate with a friend, lover or that person-on-Twitter-whose-political-views-don’t-match-yours down the drain.
The Unicode Consortium, a body that was given the historic task of designing smartphone emojis, has released a document clearly defining what each emoji means, and it contains a great many surprises. Here’s a list of some of the emojis we’ve been messing up and their correct meanings.
What this isn’t: anger
Contracted brows and a flushed face. How could this not be anger? But the emoji Nazis at the Unicode Consortium say it’s not. The face is supposed to be pouting. Go figure.
What this isn’t: sadness
Mouth slightly agape and corners turned down still doesn’t count as a sad smiley. Technically. It’s a “frowning face with open mouth”.
What this isn’t: crying face
A dejected face with a lone tear from one eye isn’t supposed to depict weeping. It’s a sleepy face.
What this isn’t: happiness
We’ve all used this as a happy face. A deep sort of happiness, in fact – contentment even. Well, it’s actually a relieved face.
What this isn’t: sassiness
A wave of the hand (or is it a hair flip?) along with a wide grin doesn’t make for a spirited chica who’s winning at life. It’s an “information desk” person ready to help you with your boring queries because she’s presumably paid to do it. A sad climbdown really.
What this isn’t: anger
The most confounding googly from amongst the lot. A frowning face with steam blowing out from both nostrils in the manner of an angry bull does not represent anger. In some parallel universe for smartphone graphic designers, nose steam is meant to convey a “face with look of triumph”. Obviously.
Emojis: a part of our linguistic tradition
The emoji was invented in 1982, as a group of Carnegie Mellon researchers were using an online bulletin board to joke about what would happen if their building's elevator cable were cut. Realising that this banter might take a morbid turn if read literally, they invented the ":)" to clear up the fact that they were only messing around.
In a way, this origin story represents how important emojis are and the role they play. For thousands of years, the only way for humans to have a real time conversation was to talk. While talking, the lexical meaning of the word was only one of the ways that interlocutors would use to exchange information. Much would also be said using facial clues, context and tone of voice. As Osho says in his now famous talk, the F-word in the English language can be used to represent “pain, pleasure, hate and love” as well as describe ignorance, trouble, fraud, aggression and displeasure amongst many other uses. It is often the way we say the F-word that tells the listener what we mean.
Of course, now for the first time in human history, we’ve gone beyond antiquated methods such as speaking in order to have a real-time conversation and upgraded to using text. And emojis are our way of getting around the shortcomings of writing, which leaves out crucial information such as tone of voice and facial expression. As Lisa Lebduska, an English professor at Wheaton College in the US, puts it in her piece Emoji, Emoji, What for Art Thou?:
Errors have shaped our language
Given that emojis are part of an older linguistic tradition, it might make you feel better to know that normal words have been subject to the same process of misinterpretation that emojis are being treated to now. In fact, these errors and mistakes are what have shaped the language we speak today, even if we’re not often aware of it.
Take the word “often” for example. For hundreds of years the “t” in “often” was silent and the word was pronounced “aw-fuhn”. Sometime in the 19th century, significant numbers of people started to pronounce it with a hard “t”, mimicking the the way it was spelt. What was happening was that with the introduction of mass education, for the first time, large numbers could now read. These newly educated people looked at the spelling of “often” and, quite logically, thought that the “t” in it must be there for a reason and took to vocalising it. Now so many people use, what was once a mistake, that all dictionaries today accept both pronunciations of the word as standard, even if the one with the “t” silent is still seen to be slightly posher.
Word such as apron and umpire once started with an “n”. Sometime in history, people mistakenly took to calling “a napron”, “an apron” and a new word was born. This is an example of sounds getting swapped between two words but sometimes sounds would be mistakenly swapped within a word. So originally, “pretty” was “pertty”, “bird” was “brid” and “horse” was “hrose”. We still see this process today, with many Indian English speakers pronouncing “ask” as “aks”.
The phrase “to curry favour” is also a mispronunciation. The original phrase was “to curry Favel”, the “Favel”referring to a horse in a 14th century poem. As time went by, the poem and poor old Favel were forgotten. And since “favour” was a word that sounded similar and also made sense, people started to use it as a replacement.
Emoji acceptance
Invented only three decades back, emojis are seen today as non-standard and, in fact, decidedly gauche. In a recent piece in The Guardian, Jonathan Jones, for example, calls them "brainless little icons" and ends off by declaiming, "Speak Emoji if you want. I’ll stick with the language of Shakespeare".
Those just might be famous last words given how quickly the use of these little icons is spreading. A study by a British linguist has found that "emoji is the fastest growing form of language in history". In the UK, 72% of 18 to 25-year-olds said they found it easier to put their feelings across in emoji icons than in text. And as we’ve seen, they’re are being being treated just like an extension of language now and are in many way being re-designed and re-imagined in much the same way as words have been for all of human history. Might not be long then before a brave new world accepts them as a completely standard part of writing.
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The Unicode Consortium, a body that was given the historic task of designing smartphone emojis, has released a document clearly defining what each emoji means, and it contains a great many surprises. Here’s a list of some of the emojis we’ve been messing up and their correct meanings.
What this isn’t: anger
Contracted brows and a flushed face. How could this not be anger? But the emoji Nazis at the Unicode Consortium say it’s not. The face is supposed to be pouting. Go figure.
What this isn’t: sadness
Mouth slightly agape and corners turned down still doesn’t count as a sad smiley. Technically. It’s a “frowning face with open mouth”.
What this isn’t: crying face
A dejected face with a lone tear from one eye isn’t supposed to depict weeping. It’s a sleepy face.
What this isn’t: happiness
We’ve all used this as a happy face. A deep sort of happiness, in fact – contentment even. Well, it’s actually a relieved face.
What this isn’t: sassiness
A wave of the hand (or is it a hair flip?) along with a wide grin doesn’t make for a spirited chica who’s winning at life. It’s an “information desk” person ready to help you with your boring queries because she’s presumably paid to do it. A sad climbdown really.
What this isn’t: anger
The most confounding googly from amongst the lot. A frowning face with steam blowing out from both nostrils in the manner of an angry bull does not represent anger. In some parallel universe for smartphone graphic designers, nose steam is meant to convey a “face with look of triumph”. Obviously.
Emojis: a part of our linguistic tradition
The emoji was invented in 1982, as a group of Carnegie Mellon researchers were using an online bulletin board to joke about what would happen if their building's elevator cable were cut. Realising that this banter might take a morbid turn if read literally, they invented the ":)" to clear up the fact that they were only messing around.
In a way, this origin story represents how important emojis are and the role they play. For thousands of years, the only way for humans to have a real time conversation was to talk. While talking, the lexical meaning of the word was only one of the ways that interlocutors would use to exchange information. Much would also be said using facial clues, context and tone of voice. As Osho says in his now famous talk, the F-word in the English language can be used to represent “pain, pleasure, hate and love” as well as describe ignorance, trouble, fraud, aggression and displeasure amongst many other uses. It is often the way we say the F-word that tells the listener what we mean.
Of course, now for the first time in human history, we’ve gone beyond antiquated methods such as speaking in order to have a real-time conversation and upgraded to using text. And emojis are our way of getting around the shortcomings of writing, which leaves out crucial information such as tone of voice and facial expression. As Lisa Lebduska, an English professor at Wheaton College in the US, puts it in her piece Emoji, Emoji, What for Art Thou?:
Emojis are not so much destroying linguistic traditions as they are stretching them, opening a gateway to a non-discursive language of new possibility and even responding to John Trimbur's call for a rematerializing of literacy, by reminding us that writing always had and always will have a visual component mediated by a material world. The narratives of emojis, then, are the narratives of writing itself.
Errors have shaped our language
Given that emojis are part of an older linguistic tradition, it might make you feel better to know that normal words have been subject to the same process of misinterpretation that emojis are being treated to now. In fact, these errors and mistakes are what have shaped the language we speak today, even if we’re not often aware of it.
Take the word “often” for example. For hundreds of years the “t” in “often” was silent and the word was pronounced “aw-fuhn”. Sometime in the 19th century, significant numbers of people started to pronounce it with a hard “t”, mimicking the the way it was spelt. What was happening was that with the introduction of mass education, for the first time, large numbers could now read. These newly educated people looked at the spelling of “often” and, quite logically, thought that the “t” in it must be there for a reason and took to vocalising it. Now so many people use, what was once a mistake, that all dictionaries today accept both pronunciations of the word as standard, even if the one with the “t” silent is still seen to be slightly posher.
Word such as apron and umpire once started with an “n”. Sometime in history, people mistakenly took to calling “a napron”, “an apron” and a new word was born. This is an example of sounds getting swapped between two words but sometimes sounds would be mistakenly swapped within a word. So originally, “pretty” was “pertty”, “bird” was “brid” and “horse” was “hrose”. We still see this process today, with many Indian English speakers pronouncing “ask” as “aks”.
The phrase “to curry favour” is also a mispronunciation. The original phrase was “to curry Favel”, the “Favel”referring to a horse in a 14th century poem. As time went by, the poem and poor old Favel were forgotten. And since “favour” was a word that sounded similar and also made sense, people started to use it as a replacement.
Emoji acceptance
Invented only three decades back, emojis are seen today as non-standard and, in fact, decidedly gauche. In a recent piece in The Guardian, Jonathan Jones, for example, calls them "brainless little icons" and ends off by declaiming, "Speak Emoji if you want. I’ll stick with the language of Shakespeare".
Those just might be famous last words given how quickly the use of these little icons is spreading. A study by a British linguist has found that "emoji is the fastest growing form of language in history". In the UK, 72% of 18 to 25-year-olds said they found it easier to put their feelings across in emoji icons than in text. And as we’ve seen, they’re are being being treated just like an extension of language now and are in many way being re-designed and re-imagined in much the same way as words have been for all of human history. Might not be long then before a brave new world accepts them as a completely standard part of writing.