Emojis are 🔥 right now. Netflix’s Adolescence hinges on them. The US national security adviser, Mike Waltz, celebrates bombing Yemen with them. Prince William has a fondness for the aubergine.
Emoji use may seem childish or trite, but it’s not a passing fad. It’s increasingly a language in its own right and evolving fast. Not so long ago, few would bother searching for an icon when just typing a word is clearer and – crucially – quicker. That was then. Now, more and more people lean on those ubiquitous little icons.
Why? Because the printed word is a hopeless carrier of tone. If you want to transmit how you feel in writing, emojis are your friend.
But take Waltz’s leaked Signal message. To some, it conveyed patriotic pride. To others, shocking crassness. This tension between intended and perceived meaning is the beating ❤️ of emoji culture.
The craving for nuance goes back decades. The first recorded emoticon appeared in Reader’s Digest in 1967, with a tongue-in-cheek -) credited to “Aunt Ev”. Two years later, the Russian-American writer Vladimir Nabokov is quoted in the New York Times arguing for a “typographical sign for a smile”.
Then in 1982, the computer science professor Scott Fahlman proposed 🙂 as a joke marker to help students misreading message board posts.
Emojis themselves trace back to a 1988 Sharp palmtop computer. Then in 1999 the Japanese designer Shigetaka Kurita’s 176-icon set was the first to go mainstream. Perhaps surprisingly, the emoji was conceived without an aubergine in sight.
Using pictures in language is hardly new. From cave art to Egyptian hieroglyphs, graphical communication predates the alphabet. Roman curse tablets have been discovered containing images whose meanings are partly lost. Was this ancient trolling, with pictures thrown in for effect?
Today, people of all ages are using emojis – and miscommunication is everywhere. If you use the most basic smiley face, innocently assuming this means “happy”, beware. For Gen Z, this humble-seeming emoji often denotes sarcasm and is as inadvisable as finishing a text with a full stop.
It’s a minefield. An Emojipedia exists, but maybe it’s time the Oxford English Dictionary added an emoji appendix – an official, regularly updated barometer of these ubiquitous images and their shifting definitions, as portrayed heartbreakingly in Adolescence. Sound far-fetched? The OED made 😂 its word of the year in 2015, noting it had caused the biggest linguistic spike that year. To deny the importance of emoji is to be 👑 Canute holding back the 🌊.
As the cliche goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. In the march of the emojis, the only real surprise is why any of us were surprised.
