Words, But Also Picture

Language is a weird thing. It’s constantly evolving, changing and growing. Words fall in and out of common usage, are adopted from other dialects and just get plain old made-up then forced upon us colloquially. Something rather interesting has happened though with the rise of the internet, smartphones and general global connectivity. We’ve started supplementing our words in the classical sense with pictures, and it’s this group of pictures known as Emojis which now forms up to 92 percent of the online population’s daily language choice. What’s even more surprising perhaps is how closely the written word and images have interacted for communication historically, and exactly how far from being a new idea deploying a winky face emoji is.

We’ve been using pictures to get our point across for millennia. Hieroglyphics, cave paintings and even more modern pictographic languages evidence this. Given humans have had the ability for speech for about 200,000 years, while the oldest language still in use today (Tamil, still spoken in Sri Lanka and Singapore) is around 5,000 years old, we do need to be flexible when it comes to changes in the way we communicate. Emojis, those tiny pictures of faces, people and things are actually an evolution themselves of emoticons. These being the combinations of characters you’d use to make faces, which appeared when digital text-based communication became commonplace. My personal favorite was “:-|”.

So what technically is an Emoji, and how are they everywhere now? Well the underlying technology which makes them so ubiquitous is called Unicode. This is a set of rules which means that all devices agree upon what a certain piece of computer code looks like. Unicode is what prevents a happy faced Emoji sent from my iPhone from showing up as a sad one on my friend’s Android. Even though in fact, Android devices do make me sad. Using Unicode Standard, this remains true whether you are Tweeting, Facebooking, texting or creating websites. What Unicode corresponds to which Emoji is actually governed by the Unicode Consortium, who carefully create and curate the list of graphics we’re able to creatively or suggestively deploy.

Now, I won’t argue that while their design and usage isn’t short on whimsy and amusement, there is such a thing in this case as too much of a good thing. The overuse of any linguistic object becomes maddening before too long. Please see the unending use of “literally” when people actually mean “figuratively” as a wonderful example. I’m not old enough (yet…) to be truly be offended, but I do sympathize with irk surrounding a simple message being made cryptic solely to shoehorn in Emoji coolness. Throwing in a smirk though to indicate sarcasm at the end of a sentence? Or a simple heart when wishing someone a good day? That’s not only harmless, but does serve a purpose to elevate the message.

So what’s next? Well happily, we do get to enjoy several new releases of Emojis spread out over the course of any given year. Coming down the pipe is a moose, a jellyfish, a goose and some maracas to enjoy. Looking further out, we can expect more pop culture trends to make their way to Emoji status and its adoption by even more platforms. What’s fairly clear however is that it’s going to expand and become even more common before it gets replaced by the next thing. I for one can’t wait to call someone a silly goose, using an actual goose.

Smirking Emoji.