Ologies with Alie Ward - Curiology (EMOJI) Part 1 with Various Emoji Experts

Episode Date: July 6, 2023

Thumbs up? Thumbs down. Skulls of joy. And so many expressions of pain and comfort. This, my babies, is the  -ology that sparked this whole podcast. Curiology means “writing with pictures” but will certified emoji experts agree that they are curiologists? Listen in for behind-the-scenes drama, origin stories, stats on usage, trends and global context with Emojipedia founder Jeremy Burge, designer Jennifer Daniel, and the world’s first emoji translator (and current Emojipedia editor-in-chief) Keith Broni. And get ready to celebrate World Emoji Day on July 17. 📙 Emojipedia🎉 #WorldEmojiDay 7/17/23🍳 Emoji KitchenVisit Jeremy Burge’s website and follow him on Instagram, Twitter and TikTokVisit Keith Broni’s blog and follow him on TwitterSubscribe to Jennifer Daniel’s Substack and follow them on Instagram, Twitter and TikTokA donation went to: UnicodeMore episode sources and linksSmologies (short, classroom-safe) episodesOther episodes you may enjoy: Etymology (WORD ORIGINS), Phonology (LINGUISTICS), Deltiology (POSTCARDS), Enigmatology (WORD PUZZLES), Proptology (THEATER & FILM PROPS), Fanthropology (FANDOM), Screamology (LOUD VOCALIZATIONS), Tiktokology (THE TIKTOK APP) with Hank Green, Speech Pathology (TALKING DOGS... AND PEOPLE), Medusology (JELLYFISH), Teuthology (SQUIDS)Sponsors of OlogiesTranscripts and bleeped episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, masks, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramEditing by Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio Productions and Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam Media and Mark David ChristensonTranscripts by Emily White of The WordaryWebsite by Kelly R. DwyerTheme song by Nick Thorburn

Oh, hey, it's your building manager texting you. So sorry to hear about the death of your praying mantis. With a cry laughing emoji, Ali Ward, with another episode of Oligis. This week, what is it? What is it? What is it? It's emojis. Or is it emoji? Shit. I only like, tries to police how you pluralize a word.

You know, there's no right answer. You just isn't. That is Jennifer Daniel, one of not one. And not two, but threeologists. We have on this very, very giant and dear to my heart, episode about curiosity. Jennifer is currently an emoji designer at Google who's responsible for designing a bunch of emojis,

some that you're gonna love, like a serious fan favorite, the melting face emoji. And Jennifer's also a member of the Unicode emoji subcommittee, which may have you sitting at home wondering, what the heck is a Unicode? And I promise you, we're going to get into that also soon. I didn't know either, and it's fascinating. So who else are we going to be hearing from? Well, there's Keith Brony. From a very technical perspective, it's emoji, but if you look at how people are actually using the term, it's emojis.

And this is a classic example of language changing. If you want to be really, really technical, it's a Japanese term, and emoji, picture character, is both the singular and the plural. Keith is the current editor-in-chief of a Mojipedia, who, after writing his dissertation on the use of emojis at University College London became the world's first professional emoji translator and shares what I would perhaps describe as an academic perspective throughout what will be this big two-parter on this daily

part of our lives emoji emoji. And finally, Jeremy Birch, who founded Emojapedia. That was me in 2013. I did. And until very recently, represented Emojapedia and the Unicode Technical Committee. We're gonna get in the trenches of emojis, the real gritty behind the scenes, backstage worlds of these beloved and mercurial little language cartoons. But first, we'd like to do a little thanks up top. Thank you to patrons who support us and let us make donations every week to charities of theologist choosing. For as little as a buck a month, you can join patreon.com slash allergies and you make that possible. You also get to

make questions for ourologists. I may be saying your name on the show, but we also like to read a review every week because as you know, I read them all and then I pick one. And this week's comes from Andrea Ocarina or Andrea Ocarina who wrote, Hey, Bestie, I feel like Mulder talking to anyone who will listen except to talk about your podcast and not aliens. I hope you read this. Hey, guess what? I did. And maybe I read your name wrong, but I read it a couple times, so hopefully I got it right. Thank you, everyone who leaves reviews. I read them and sometimes I weep in the best way. Okay, curiosity, let's get into it.

I've been waiting years for this. So, curiosity comes from curiosity logic, which means representing things by their pictures instead of by symbols. And it comes from a Greek word, curiosity, meaning obvious language. And where can you kick this off with a bit of debate about this charm charm with our three

ologists. Let's get into it with Cureologists, Jennifer Daniel, Keith Brony, and who you'll hear from first, Jeremy Birch. Now, okay. There is a little bit of controversy about theology for this topic. Yes, I love controversy. Okay, good. So this topic has been the inception of all of allergies, which has changed my whole life. It's a big one for me. Okay, okay. Which is why I needed to call in the big gums.

I feel the pressure now. Oh, okay. So, allergies started because 20 years ago, 21 years ago, I was on the internet and there was a baby, baby website, like a Geocities type of website. Okay. All angel fire or all. Yeah, but you know, a classic, classic. GeoCity's type of website. Okay. An angel fire or a classic.

And it listed all the allergies. And I land on that page because I was trying to come up with a name for an art company that I was starting and I wanted to know if curiosity was a real word. And I found out via this little website that it means writing with pictures. Okay. So I was an illustrator at the time. So like writing with pictures, it. So I was an illustrator at the time. So like writing with pictures, it definitely, I responded well to that.

And so I called my company Curiology forever, but in the back of my head, I always had this list of allergies that I wanted to do something with, make a book or do, you know, it's sad. And so when it came time to do an emojis episode, I am of the belief that it is somewhat like writing with pictures because you're conveying something, but you're shaking your head a little. No, no, no, no, no, I, I, I agree. You

know, the, the, the first thing that often happens in any kind of discussion of emoji is, some people feel like it's a language in a, a way of communicating and it's not, but I think you're right. I'm not shaking my head. In fact, I think I meant to nod. Oh, okay. Because that's the etymology of emoji. That's what the word emoji means is picture character in Japanese. So I think you couldn't be more accurate almost to the actual meaning. So you are a keyriologist then.

I love that. I mean, that makes me sound much more impressive. You're not having an emoji head. I'll take that, yeah. And how about our active Unicode board member and an emoji designer, Jennifer Daniel? Does she approve? A free dictionary is telling me the representation of things or sounds by means of their picture instead of symbols or words.

So would that be, I feel like emojis that that applies. And if it doesn't count, you can tell me why. Dereology is great. Cereology is great. You know, when I think about emojis, I think historically, they are firmly grounded in a visual space. But as we start to communicate outside of SMS, text messaging, which is kind of a legacy of the past, it's not purely visual form anymore. It really is supplemental to gesture and intonation and body language and all of these things, but there isn't without a doubt

that emoji have a visual representation, in which case it would be perfectly suitable for curology. Okay, so far two for two on curiology, which delights me, but how about the current editor-in-chief of a Mojipedia professional emoji translator, Keith Brony, who literally wrote his dissertation on the use of emojis?

What's his take? In terms of being a cardiologist, I mean, the emoji keyboard is not just a set of, you know, literal pictographic depictions of objects. There is a lot of ideograms in there as well. There's the classic heart, ideograms, where that's not a literal depiction of a human heart, but people associate that particular design with affection.

There's also, of course, all of the very smiley faces that have those ideograms within them as well, as the face with two big heart eyes, as the face surrounded by hearts, as the face kind of blowing a kind of a kiss that has a little heart there representing it. So the emoji keyboard is a kind of a mix of genuine representations of objects,

but there's also so many metaphorical, symbolic representations of concept as well. So it's kind of a mix of both in the category of the the smiley emojis. I mean there's so many expressions there that obviously we with our faces cannot literally do. I mean we cannot turn our eyes into hearts, we cannot turn our eyes into stars, you know. The various ways in which sweat drops or teardrops are utilized across the smiley faces are a very cartoonish in nature.

I mean, a lot of the design conventions used across the emoji keyboard are drawn from comic book conventions or conventions in anime and manga. I had no idea about the influence of comic book art on emoji design, but it also came up talking to Jennifer who mentioned the work of Neil Cohn, who's a cognitive scientist, and a comics theorist. And Neil was nominated for a 2021 Eisner Award, which is like the Oscars for comics, for best academic scholarly work. And he wrote a book, Who Understands Comics? Questioning the universality of visual language comprehension.

And that presents the theory that he has that drawings and sequential images are structured the same as language. So I don't know, maybe we can get him on the show sometime to discuss comics. I don't know what that would be. Maybe graphic narrative. Actually, scratch that. I just looked it up and people do use comicology to talk about this art. We're going to workshop it. Maybe a later date will have that episode. Anyway, take it away Jennifer. He's amazing. For example, he collected a large number of manga and comic books. And then all the faces that were in each one of these created a taxonomy of the different facial expressions and identified 69 unique expressions that all had very distinct meaning. Well, I took those 69 expressions and then said,

okay, this one's represented in emoji, this one's represented in emoji, this one isn't. Oh, wow. Okay, this one is, this one's like similar enough, but then there was one that was like paperification because it's paper magazine, right? When a character kind of wants to disappear, they kind of turn into paper and float away.

Oh, wow. And so between that and this other convention, which was changing the opacity of a character to make them a transparent, we got dotted line face. So you're disappearing and we got multi-face. Wow. You are able to take these conventions and that's a thing is like you can never really make

something new. I think that's a common misconception that you have to make something new. But it's really something that's existed for a really, really long. One time, Jared had this viral tweet about how most domestic partnerships are just urgently demanding that your partner look at your pet. Like, look at them, look at them, even though they're exactly the same as they always are.

And this tweet continues to make the rounds for years. And I always think that some of the most resonant or successful bits of art or comedy or whatever aren't something that no one has ever seen before, but actually identifying something everyone's familiar with, but no one has really named or pointed out, at least not recently. That also seems to be what makes a successful new emoji as well. So the little tiny picture that you didn't know how much you needed. Anyway, back to talking to Keith about the question of curiosity. I asked him if he thought it would be closer

to the study of symbolic communication, VSM Iotics. Amoji's kind of sit in this fascinating place because they are a part of our keyboard. So it is fair enough to say that there is a huge element of curiological work in dealing with emojis. There's a lot of semiotics as well. There's a lot of linguistics. There's a lot of design thinking.

Okay, I'm calling that three for three. I think that's a slam dunk. Now, some could argue that curiology is a more literal use of images as language, like with hieroglyphics, but until we start an X podcast, I'm standing by curiosity. All right, let's get into the history of emojis with Jeremy. When did emojis start? You know what? So that one of the confusing bits about the early emoji history is just the fact that I guess a lot of us hit around and I say us of I'm 38. So for reference, when I grew up a popular messaging app was MSN Messenger Messenger. In Australia, I know over here, a well-installed messenger was popular. And they have like, smileys as well.

And people are often like, aren't they emojis, too? And they look very similar, but the reason that emoji became, I guess, universal, became on every platform is that they existed in Japan. And the idea was you could insert them into regular text. You could have some normal text and put it alongside. They didn't matter which SMS you were using, which platform. And that's sort of their origin story. And then the world expanded and we needed to be compatible with each other.

So the rest of the world needed emoji support. Otherwise, we couldn't talk to our Japanese friends. And our Japanese friends would not be interested in mobile platforms from Apple and Google, which was their priority at the time. And when it comes to how they're displayed on different phones and different computers, is there a code that says, this is gonna be someone weeping and melting,

and then every different platform has to have a certain thing that represents that code. Yes, the origin of every emoji having a name is that in the early days, an emoji had a name and each platform could do what they want with that. You'd have an emoji that says, smiling face and you go, easy. Oh, that.

You want big tick, but then you get ones like face with hand over mouth. And this one was complicated because some platforms made the eyes look like they were laughing. Some made the eyes look like they were serious. Some made the eyes look like they were serious. So if you imagine a face with a hand over the mouth, that can either be sort of shocked, or I'm sorry, or it can be ha-ha, that's very funny.

And there's definitely been plenty of people online who have run into trouble with this sort of influences and sort of minus celebrities who might react to a new story, thinking they're being sincere or you know shocked and Other people see it on their phone is laughing Which is not what you want to do has that that's happened to celebrities that is definitely happened to celebrities Oh, this definitely happens all the time and some quick googling will take you to plenty of articles sharing emoji fails which mostly seem to be related to individuals who are just

surely trying to express grief or sympathy through a text usually related to like an injury or the death of a pet or a loved one and they use the crying emoji but accidentally hit the cry laughing emoji which is just so sinister and cruel but I did find one little fun celeb emoji mix up pretty recently. And in September 2022, when Queen Elizabeth II passed away, beloved Pop-Diva chair included in her text of mourning. I'm so proud she was a and then added the emoji for a bowl, which looked a lot like Cher was calling the late Queen a cow. Now initially some thought perhaps she meant to use the goat emoji calling her the greatest of all time. However, a student

fans did their own like be boo, be boo, be processing and decoded that Cher was actually saying I'm so proud she was a Taurus because Cher and Queen Elizabeth, the second apparently, shared the same earth sign in the sun position of their zodiac charts. And the end of that tweet was that Cher was happy the Queen had a great sense of charts. And the end of that tweet was that share was happy. The Queen had a great sense of humor. So I'm sure everyone in all astral planes got a kick out of it. Share, when I die, you can call me a cow. It would be an honor.

Anything but the thumbs up. And we're going to get to that later. There's another instance where the drooling emoji for a while there on some platforms looked like, you could barely tell the drool was there. So you might think it's just a nice smiley face on another's sort of this ridiculous cartoon eyes giant eyes with giant pools of water coming out the corner of the lip and if you're posting that going oh this looks nice you might not have even noticed there's a little drool out the corner on one phone so there was an era where that was happening a lot. And then the

last few years, the companies have kind of got together and there's a lot more consistency now. You can be a lot more confident in the last three or so years that you're emoji. You might not have the same style. It might be glossy or might be flat-shaded, but it's going to look pretty close, whereas five, ten years ago, it's the Wild West out there with some of them. When it comes to how they're coded, does that mean that different devices have to say, okay, well, when I get this code in, that means this is going to pop up for it. And so we have to make sure that it's not too different so that the CryLaf doesn't look too weepy on one and have a completely different meaning, depending on the user.

Yes, and I think that was probably something that was less appreciated in the earlier days of emoji. It really felt like, okay, here are a bunch of code points. Go off and design them, and everyone went off, and they're like, I just made the most beautiful cucumber. Everyone went off and designed their own emoji, and what happened was the opposite of what Unicode wanted to happen, which is that you wanted

to be able to send in any language what you intended to someone else. But if I was sending you a cucumber emoji for my Android device, and on your Apple device, it is a cucumber, but it's been cut up. Oh, yeah. The context of why I'm sending a cucumber

completely different things. And no one wants to be misunderstood. And so, I think in recent years, there's been a real concerted effort to reconcile meaningful variances of interpretation. And the ones that were most egregious were probably the faces because one, they're emotional. And so those are a lot harder,

are like infinite, prismatic emotions are hard to capture in one image. And we're also evolved to read micro-expression. So even something that's an eyebrow that's slightly less concave than another can be interpreted differently. Speaking of misunderstood emojis, I think it's safe to say that one of the most famously ambiguous emojis we've all been there is the one with the two hands pressed together.

Are they praying hands or is it a high five? Who's lying? And I'm praying for closure. I'm going to high five anyone who can give it to me. In this case, Keith, give us a hand. Actually, the folded hands emoji was never intended to be a high five emoji. Now that's not to say that it has never been used as a high five emoji. But if you look at this emoji's earliest designs on some platforms, take for example the Microsoft emoji says, it actually depicts what the original

name of that emoji was, which was person with folded hands. And listeners can go to a emoji period, they can go to the folded hands emoji page, they can go down to Microsoft, and they can see all of the historic emoji designs and what we will see from several years ago is a person with both of their hands folded, their face a bit solemn. Adjust your associated course with prayer or maybe not must-e or in certain countries like Japan, like expressing thanks. Now if you go to certain platforms and you enter in high five into an emoji search bar, it will suggest the folded hands emoji, which is one of the spaces where this possible interpretation is come from. But if you actually look at how people use this emoji and it actually is one of the

most popular across the world, high five is an incredibly niche use case. I will say this, there is really no right and wrong way to use an emoji. It all comes down to whether or not the person at the other end of the message you're sending will be able to interpret the emoji correctly. So there you have it. Once and for all, here on Alleges, is the emoji praying hands or is it a high five? And the definitive answer is yes. So okay. But let's get back to the early days, the growth and the spread of emoji. When did it make the jump from Japan?

I remember I didn't get an iPhone until 2009 or something, and then I remember when my friend Micah sent me the first emoji I'd ever seen, I think it was an arm flexing, and I was like, how did you put the tiny picture in there? Good emoji, yeah. It's a great emoji, but when did it start to spread culturally? So around 2009 to 2012, it was almost like a,

it wasn't deliberate, but it almost had all the cues of a viral soft launch, because they were sort of hidden at first, yet to download special apps. And so the first time nearly any of us saw it was when we had our cool friend, who'd send us an emoji, and he'd be like, wow, I've got to get that. And that wasn't intentional at all, it just hadn't finished making. I was compatible with Japan, so some people knew how to get to it, some people didn't. But it was around 2012 when they became standardized and you could use them on theoretically every phone. And then I don't think the idea of them being an exciting

item of pop culture that we could all rally around the go, I love this emoji, I like that emoji, and that would be around 2014, I would say. Do you remember when you updated your phone and had it on your keyboard for the first time? Oh, for sure. I remember driving from Arizona to California for some road trip and a new iPhone, I suppose came out and it wasn't default installed. So you had to download this other keyboard

to get it to render. So that predates unit codes involvement in it. But then there's like this big gap, right? Like I remember that moment. I remember using them. But then I didn't really know what an emoji really was. For a long time, actually, in retrospect, yeah, I don't know.

Like you see them in Gmail, like there was that little lobster guy that, yeah, I had an animation where it chopped its claws. I just used it because he was sassy, you know? And so, like, that's not really an emoji, but it is emoji adjacent, but that's true of everything. You know, you just want to, like, what is this new thing? What is the difference between an emoji and a modicon?

It does depend on who you talk to, but these days we tend to accept that an emoticon is a text-based character, so like the colon and the smile, or the equal sign and the bracket to make a smile, that sort of thing. We did kind of incorporate also these custom ones on MSN. You type them the same way.

What if you listen to the smile? Remember, you would type this smiley and then it would replace it with an image. emoji tends to be this very standardized set that a committee agreed to and they're on every keyboard in the world, whereas an emoticon could be just anything in any app. Well, one reason I've wanted to interview you forever is that you launched a cycle of emoji pedia. I did.

Which is a big deal. It is where people go to figure out what is this emoji? How are people using this? What does this mean? If I get this, what does it mean if I accidentally give this? So what led you to want to create an information hub for that? I did like a Mertekons and Emergies and we all had the thing we were playing with them.

And I've always quite liked technology and get the latest update and see what's in there. And it was exciting one year when no one really discussed this but Apple you got your updated your iPhone and there were new emojis there and like most nerds do you go to Google it you go to have a look this is around 2012 and there's just I don't know anyone was talking about it and I've I just figured that didn't make any sense I'm like well people, they weren't a phenomenon yet, but they're pretty popular. And like, why are there no articles

listing what the new emojis are? That makes no sense to me. So it was as simple as that, that it started off wanting to know what the new ones were. And so I'd go through it all this. You'd compare notes with friends, or you'd find someone with an old phone, and it evolved and over time.

So that was the origin of emoji pd. And then I thought well I also want to know what they mean or what they're called and that started a very long journey. What was the moment when you decided for it to go from an idea into something real? I'd been playing around for about six months. I was working for universities at the time setting up sort of their websites and things and trying to convince them to put emojis on their websites. I mean, there's some technical issues and they weren't very interested. So it's about six months of playing with them

and then one day I was just like, oh, anyone can set up a website. It's not hard, it's like your Oligis Angel Fire list. The first emoji video is just one page with a list of names, and it evolved from there. So I would say six months of playing around and then one night of putting something quick together.

That's how it works. It kind of just like simmers and then, ta-da. It was the name as well. I remember coming home, it was my birthday. I'd been thinking about the idea, it'd been out for dinner and drinks, and like, OG PDR is such an obvious name. It's not, doesn't take a genius to come up with it, but I've been playing with the idea

of having a site that listed every emoji and what they meant. And it's just like, I've got to go in the soon as I come in the door, I had a few drinks, but I could still navigate the computer, navigate the internet. And I'm just like, surely this is going to be taken as a user name and a domain name and it wasn't. So, like, that's it. You've got a name, you have to start. You'll be so mad if six months from now or a year from now, someone else does this and you think, I was going to do that. How did you start to fill out what

meant what? Because things can mean different things to different people, right? They can. So, I learned so much. I was an absolute novice. I had no idea when I very first started making this list that they even had an official name. I just was like, all right, let me put each one down and then I went, what am I going to call them? I thought, okay, let me just check what Apple calls them. And I found you could do a text to speech thing and I went, okay, so Apple calls them this, but where are they getting that list from? And this is when I realized they'd been incorporated in the Unicode standard, which is an international standard for every

text character in the world. So Unicode is inscrutable, very hard to figure out their documentation, but they had a list on their site just saying, here's every emoji. And I went, oh, I'll use that thing. Thanks very much. Who is deciding at Unicode? Because I didn't know about Unicode until very recently. Who's on the board deciding what emojis exist, what they mean, what they look like? Is there one giant conference table? There is a conference table. So the origins of Unicode are very boring, very noble. It's 20, 30 years ago, there was no way to have a document that had different languages in it. You had to say, this document is in Japanese, or this document is in English.

So you had nerds that are intertext and internationalization. Very smart people came up with this standard. And then when a moji first got incorporated into this standard, you had this esoteric list of little pictures from Japan that a few random guys made up. It wasn't standardized over there. It's just whoever made it up. And then when it became an international standard, the same people who know about fonts and technology, they just sort of, by default, were the people who were administering the new emoji lists. So they weren't necessarily qualified as in they didn't have any special qualification for emoji, they would just text standardization people.

So the Unico Consortium, usually just called UnicoD, is an international organization that's made up of a variety of different member companies, primarily tech companies, so like Apple, Google, Microsoft. They basically create this standardization document that talks about how text should be encoded across all digital devices. It actually originates from the late 80s, early 90s in Silicon Valley. There was discussions between Apple engineers and Microsoft engineers who realized, look,

if various different computational devices are being constructed all across the globe, we want to make sure that each of those different devices regardless of their manufacturer are going to be able to communicate correctly with one another. Around 30 years ago the Unicode Consortium was created. In every year the Unicode Technical Committee publishes and specifies the rules and the algorithms and all the properties necessary to achieve interoperability between different platforms and languages. And when I say interoperability, I really just mean you can type the letter A and the person on the other end can see the letter A or alf or whatever letter or language you want,

you know, because not just letters, there's also scripts. But anyways, now it's more reasonable that when you send the letter A from your device, the person on the other end will see the same thing. And that's what Unicode does. They basically say here's a single character set that covers the languages of the world. And emoji are the same ways. Letter A has a code point. And what is a code point exactly? A code point is a sequence of letters and numbers that it's like the code, the code that renders any number of things. So it's the code that renders the letter. Okay.

So the code for letter A is U, 00, F1. Oh. Yes, right? That's just for the capital A. There's a different code point for lowercase A, which is 0061. And that's why there is a difference between the capital A and a lowercase A. Now the way that A presents itself is different, depending on the font you're using. Using Comic Sans or using ElbedoCo, what are you using? And emoji the same way.

Each one is assigned a code point, so the code point for skull is 1f480. Wow, okay. And every emoji has a code point assigned to it. So. So each, yeah, each one isn't a picture. It's a really detailed and colorful letter. Which I feel like there aren't necessarily colors in letters and numbers. But a letter in a font having all of these details. How are you even telling the computer how to render that? Well, this is what's interesting. When we think of what a font is, what do you think of?

Oh, I feel like Sarif's, Sans Sarif's italics. I feel like it has the bare bones of the structure, but then it modifies it, but I might be completely wrong. No, but that's the thing. We all come to it with a preconceived notion of how a font should operate. You can change the color, you can change the size, you can change how it would appear,

you can change the formatting, all the things that you just described. Now font technology has gotten to a place where you can do more than that. You can have color fonts. And so color fonts, while not how we commonly think of fonts, is a reason why people don't know that emoji are fonts, because it defies how you think of them. You're like, no, a font is aerial. I wouldn't say there is a large market for color fonts yet, because they are more complex. So I think

emoji are probably the most popular use case of a color font. But even with that color you can't do things to emoji like you can't affront. You can't make it a telly. You can't bold it right. So they look like pictures so you present them as a picture. And I think that's like a fair assumption to make. But the word is Japanese. Like emoji is not, doesn't mean emotion, right? It's a picture character, emoji, right? And so if you think about code points, it's the same thing. There's the picture and the character, the code, that's defined. So it is

inherently a technical artifact. And all Unicode really does is they have a very lengthy spreadsheet of says like, here are characters on a list. And this is what they mean. And this is what their names are. And this is how they map between different character sets. So does that mean, let's say this school one like 0f is 114 which by the way I feel like is a great long hand for one you want to say that you are dead laughing now. Yes. I really do think this is like how funny shortcodes work too. The time it takes to find the right emoji you just don't so you just write colon dead colon you know like yeah you understand or just like shock.gift you

don't even get a gift anymore you just like either the idea okay so Unicode does all this cataloging of emojis internally for tech but how about cataloging them for the public at large, who's using them and misusing them? How did all the internal work of Unicode get out there for folks just kind of casually tippy-tapeting on pocket computers, us woozy little cows like you and me?

Let's pop back to Jeremy and talk about the growth of Emojapedia. Did people take notice of emoji pedia and you? Did people start saying like, hey, what are you working on? Let's show you what we've got coming up or when did you start to become an authority in the field? Emoji pedia kind of blew up overnight in a small way that because we started publishing lists of upcoming emojis, which I thought was interesting, one day there was sort of

news that not quite leaked, but someone had said, oh, hey, there's some upcoming emojis, which I thought was interesting. One day there was sort of news, not quite leaked, but someone had said, oh, hey, there's some new emojis coming out. And when you looked it up, emojiPD would come up. And I by that stage had gone from treating it like a side project or taking it pretty seriously. You would see gone from five visits a day

to sort of a thousand visits a day and then 10,000 visits a day. So this is only about a year in. And then I went, all right, I've got to clean this side off. I've done it, but it was a lot of late nights and kind of asking my friends, hey, what do you think this face? You know, I've got the official name here, but for the meaning of what does it mean, there was a lot of just me looking at it and going, this one looks the same as that one, but it's a bit happier. So that would be the description for the first year. So while describing each of the emojis was challenging just in its most basic definitions,

with the constant evolution of emoji and culture, how does emoji pedia keep up with the ever-evolving definitions? Just thinking about it, it makes my stomach hurt, it causes me a sense of overwhelmed vertigo. How does an expert cope with this? I ask Keith. There is a lot of social listening involved. There's a lot of data that we're pulling from various sources that we're able to do so. But also, there's a lot of crowd sourcing that is involved as well.

We have to be tipped off to a certain thing, maybe happening on one platform versus another. And we're so lucky that we have such a global user base that's very invested in the reporting that a Mojipedia does. And maybe tips us off that hang on. Have you seen this happening with this emoji? And we'll kind of jump in on the beginning of an emergent viral trend. That was the case with, for example, the triangular flag emoji becoming the go-to symbol

for conveying the sense of someone has a red flag. That term where someone's got a red flag as a behavior that's incredibly counterproductive or very, very negative that gives people to use dating parlance the Ick. That emoji had exists on the keyboard for an incredibly long time. By and large, it had always been conveyed as a little red flag, a little triangular red flag. But it never

really was used to convey that term up until one post goes viral. We get the tip off. We kind of monitor the situation. We kind of look into our social listening tools, and are able to see your spike in popularity and see the change in terminology that's being used alongside the emoji. People buy and large use emojis as punctuation with text, so when you see social posts, emojis are going to sit in the same place. Buy and large that you would expect to see a full stop or an exclamation mark or even a question mark. And then you're able to really see,

okay, this is what the topic of conversation is in relation to this emoji. And we monitor how it kind of progresses. You see this all the time as well. This saluting face emoji is another one that kind of jumped hugely in popularity recently, actually during the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk. As you know, people were being acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk, as people were being made redundant at the Frightened Center, they were signing off with a salute emoji. What we found was that emoji quickly quintupled in popularity, and though it dropped up quite

dramatically after the initial forer, its popularity is still more than double what it was before. People almost were made aware that of this emoji's existence on their keyboard after its morality, and that it became part of their more broad emoji lexicon. Okay, so quick aside, just because this made me think about an emoji which once I became aware of it, I started using all the time,

and it's this little eight-bit goblin dancing thing and it looks kind of like a purple space invader. And a moja pedia told me that it's actually known as alien monster. I started using it year to go with my friend Micah, basically as a way of just rating how much I do or very often do not have my shirt together. Like I'll say, I'm at like three out of five goblins today. I'm hanging on. I'm not doing that bad. And I know we all have secret meaning ones, but the alien monster, it's one of my favorites. It's just pixelated chaos.

But what about Jeremy as the founder of the Mojita? What's his little favorite? What's his little darling? Which emoji do you use the most? I get bored of the same emoji. So I like a new one. The melting face has been excellent in recent years, one of the best new additions, I think.

What do you like about it? The melting face, I just like any that are conflicting, which defeats the purpose in some ways, every confusing one of my favorite ones that add some ambiguity in there. And the melting face is smiling, but it's melting away. I just, I like that. I but it's melting away. I like that. I think it adds some realism. It's like talking in the real world, just to play

in smiley is just, eh, boring. What about the skull for dying laughing? Do you enjoy that juxtaposition of meaning and image? I like that it exists. I first, these things happen when I was running a Moji Pedia, I think that we saw this skull come out of nowhere that Apple one day released a list of, they're trying to show off some privacy feature and they showed off their top 10 emojis use an iMessage. And this is a good year or two before, I'd seen mainstream use of the skull.

It must have been happening. It was in the top 10 and I had to go, what is going on? Why are people using this? And clearly it was happening in younger communities and now it's very widespread. I can't use it myself. I feel like it belongs to the next generation. I don't think I can sincerely put the skull. What about you? Can you, can you? I? Scull emoji for laugh. I can do a skull emoji for laugh, but only when it's also very flat face, like

I'm dying laughing also, I do want to die from this. So it has to have a double meaning, and I would only use it in very, very intimate context probably. I wouldn't just like text a colleague, you know what I mean? Yeah, colleagues get the top five generic ones, the laugh cry, the smile, the thumbs up. Right. To get to about it. That's it. Yeah. I feel like I used the anguish face a little too much. I like the anguish face. It has a lot of emotional on one face. So much. And I feel like if you had to mind my personal data to see like how my mental health is going, it's certain points you would be like she's using the anguish face a lot. Like she must be on deadline.

We all use the same ones, the same two. Tears of joy and heart. My large margin. Like one in five emojis shared two, tears of joy and heart. I have a large margin, like one in five emojis shared as tears of joy. Oh, really? Oh, yeah. And then the red heart, probably as reasons. And there's a long drop off. We saw a huge jump in usage over the last number of years

in the loudly crying face, the emoji with these two kind of waterfall-esque tears, wearing Diana's face, which was initially created to convey genuine sadness, like absolute despondency, abject melancholy, but because of how incredibly over-the-topics design is, younger generations, particularly, began to co-opt it as, oh my god, I'm so overwhelmed, which can also be,ed as, oh my god, I'm so overwhelmed,

which can also be used to say, I'm so overwhelmed because of how hilarious this is or how cringe-inducing it is. It's actually quite diverse. And of course, one thing that we've certainly seen occur in the emoji keyboard, as things have evolved over the years, is a much wider embrace of the ironic use of emojis. Millennials and older generations by and large tend to use them in a more earnest fashion or stick more closely to their intended meanings. So if they want to, for example, convey a sense of kind of awkwardness, they would opt

for the emojis that have been kind of created to encapsulate that sensation. So, the classic kind of upside down face or more recently the melting face emoji. But more and more, we're seeing reports of younger generations kind of got a lot more playful when it comes to the emojis they are opting for to convey kind of a sense of awkwardness. There's a lot more kind of sardonic emoji use. We've seen reports of people using the cowboy hat emoji, for example, to convey a sense of awkwardness because it's just so absurdly happy and it kind of could convey in a certain context just an awkward, okay, I've just got to go along with this even though I don't feel it's appropriate for how I'm feeling at this moment in time

because I'm sitting here big goofy smile on my face cowboy hat on, again metaphorically speaking, just have it to kind of go along with this bizarre situation I'm finding myself in. Okay, so we're going to get back into how these new uses of emoji began and how a Mojipedia keeps track of them all. But first, every week we donate to a charity of theologist choosing, and this week it's going to none other than Unicode. So the Unicode Consortium, it kind of sounds like an evil corporate empire,

but surprise, it's cool as hell, and it's a non-profit. So Unicode is a 501c3 non-profit. It was founded in 1988, and it involves hundreds of professionals, so many volunteers, and language experts who are helping create and manage standards for software that's deployed on more than 20 billion devices around the globe. And it's uniting us in language and giving greater access to expression for so many people. So thank you, Unicode, for allowing us to text a drooling face

emoji to an X at 154 AM. And it least be understood if not well received. And also thank you to patrons and sponsors of Oligis who make those donations possible. Let us celebrate emojis the next few weeks. It's world emoji day July 17th. How can you celebrate? You can toss a couple bucks at Unicode.

I'm sure they'd use it. You don't have to because we did, but you always can. Okay, next week we're gonna have part two with all your questions. But for this part one, let's keep our butts at the edge of our seats, learning the history and the basics of emojis and they're constantly evolving meaning and how does

emoji paedia track them. When it comes to who's making the trends, do you find at some point like, oh, things would start on TikTok and then they would go to Twitter and then like, is there a waterfall effect? Like, where does it start? As far as we could tell, and we say a couple of years in we needed to hire data analysts to figure out what's going on, right? Twitter was easier to mine for data, which helped RC trends in big ways. We could analyze 50 million tweets or 100 million tweets. But it was clear from some of these reports from companies like Apple, whether it's electively show stuff that was happening in private messaging, as far as I can see, it's happening in private

messaging first. In small communities, small groups have a little, shared, I say language, or something that you use between your friends, a little fun idea for an emoji and it spreads from one to the next. It probably moves privately to Snapchat and then you get these blurry mixed private public platforms. Snapchat Instagram, TikTok is obviously a massive cultural hit now. TikTok know, TikTok is setting the internet culture now. No doubt that is where it's happening now, but at least when I was running it, a Twitter was the easier place to see the trends

as they hit the mainstream. And of course, a lot of social media platforms today have very different generational demographics. I mean, I don't think it's surprising for most people when I say that Facebook tends to wards older millennials to older generations in terms of its kind of active user base TikTok is primarily Gen Z and you just have platforms like Twitter that kind of exists

across different generations, although it deals again kind of skew millennial and older and you can actually see completely different trends between these platforms when it comes to certain emoji usage. So across the likes of Facebook say, the Facebook tears of joy still absolutely rules the rules in terms of the go-to emoji you can veil after. When you go to TikTok, for example, the face with tears of joy still crops up absolutely.

It's still the number one emoji in the world across all social platforms and messaging apps. But it is deemed a little chuggy or cringe very okay boomer perhaps. What about emojis whose meaning between different groups might be very different? Say, the water droplet emoji, which some very sweet and tender souls may use only to mean something straightforward, perhaps like your Mima, reminding you not to forget an umbrella,

because it might sweat droplet outside. Does Unicode worry about regulating that at all? I mean, you know, I sometimes choke that every emoji is a sex emoji. There's a thing, when you're working in a vacuum, yes, those anecdotes are really funny and I love them and I'll use them all the time. The reality is, is that 80% of the time

emoji are used, it's alongside words. So if I'm writing, I'm so horny for you. And I use that emoji. There's no question about what I mean. Right? No ambiguity there at all. And if you're trying to be coy and not be so over, then maybe, but like, if you're having like a heated conversation. then maybe, but like if you're having like a heated conversation. I don't know how to say that, right? So one of the things I do love about emoji is that it is a parallel to how we already communicate. So think about body language or eye contact, like being what might be considered too close physically to someone is considered culturally appropriate in some parts of the world and not appropriate in other parts of the world, or even hand gestures, certain hand gestures

are more looted in one parts of the world and other parts of the world. And so you have to respect that culture when you visit those places of origin. And part of it is being aware, part of it is learning through experience. And I do think what is great about emoji is that they don't need to be globally universally understood. You know, there's the motte emoji, which is a drink from a couple different places, but it basically is this brown. It almost looks like a coconut, the straw in it. And so if you're from Urgway, you'd be like, I know what that is, motte. I love motte. Thank you for the motte emoji.

You'd get to someone from like, Montana, who has not familiar at all with motte. I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that.

I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that.

I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that. it and it was effective to communicate what they needed to say to the person they were talking to. And this is just like the Tower of Babel all over again. Platforms like Twitter, where you have a global audience, it's really important to understand who your audience is. The first is like shit talking. My girlfriend. Yeah. I mean anything. I mean, I use pop prints instead of a heart to indicate.

I love just like pet names that we have for our loved ones. People use emoji in very personal ways. Well, I wonder if there's anyone that goes by just an emoji, kind of like a mononym, you know, like sting or a Beyonce or a Zendaya. Like, is there anyone that's just represented? Like, prints, Prince was the initial, just call me by this symbol from now on.

And I wonder if there's anyone doing that with just an emoji, legally. Well, certainly we're seeing a lot of folks try to use emojis as a kind of unique sign-off or fandoms representing their kind of topic of interest with specific emojis. I mean, you mentioned Beyonce there. The B emoji is very synonymous with emoji because of the Bayhive. And the Purple Heart emoji, for example, is used

hugely by fans of the K-pop band BTS. So there is certain emojis that are associated with certain kind of performers, celebrities. Now, that's not to say that emoji is definitively theirs, of course. The emoji keyboard is there to be utilized by all of us in whatever way we fancy. And it ultimately comes down to whether or not the receiver of a message we crafted with a particular emoji will have interpreted as the way we've intended it to be interpreted or not. And that also comes down to whether or not that person is within the same quote unquote in group as me.

Like, are we both members of the BTS fandom and will that other person know when I use a particular emoji that I'm referring to this member over that member? And that all comes down to, you know, insider knowledge based on the community were a part of, but that also scales up to a variety of different cultural instances.

And in fact, if you explore the emoji keyboard, there's a huge host of emojis that are there that represent certain attributes and so aspects of Japanese culture coming from their Japanese origins that many people in the Western world would look at and have no idea what this kind of concept is there to represent. And that means that they may just not get used.

It also may mean that they'll kind of be picked up and viewed with a new meaning in a certain context, because the meaning for that group of people at the moment is not particularly explicit. And then you'd see these kind of divergences across different cultural demographics, or geographical demographics, in terms of how certain emojis are being used to convey different concepts. But there's also emojis in there, food, the animals that yes, are associated with a very definitive thing in the world, but emotionally speaking can be co-opted to mean a different thing amongst a different group of people.

This can be between a couple. There's an excellent academic paper called Why Pizza, a Moji means I love you from several years ago. It talks about how couples will repurpose certain emojis between each other to convey new information. It can scale up to friend groups with their group chats where they all have shared experiences, their friends are hanging out. And a certain thing happens to one member of the friend group and there's a perfect emoji there in the keyboard to be used to represent that silly

or amusing situation. And that emoji becomes a shorthand to reference that situation or it can kind of scale up again to other different demographic groups where you're seeing a MoGB used to represent this concept for this demographic group. You can see so many different colorful emojis be used in combination one of the other to represent sexual identity or represent sports teams, things of this kind, and say, well, I'm going to use the, you know, blue and white hard emoji beside each other represent my local sports team, or, you know, the light blue hard emoji and the pink arc emoji to represent transgender identity. These are things that people can look to the emoji keyboard to communicate. They can get very playful with them in there, but, you know, ultimately, the beauty of an emoji and the utility of an emoji is in the eye

of the beholder. And just because experts and designers are more than happy with emoji definitions being so fluid and alive, it doesn't mean that people aren't out there trying to define them exactly as possible and assign them one singular definitive forever meaning for their own self-serving purposes. And those people are lawyers. The number of defense attorneys that came to me over the years that. Are you serious?

Because their argument was so funny how it's always the same. I never actually got called in to court because they never liked what I had to say. Because what they'd ostensibly want me to say is that whichever emoji they're defendant put at the end of their message meant that they were kidding. They'd normally say something horrific or something, some implication of any kind, and they go, oh, but that was a wink at the end, you're on. So clearly the wink means, I mean, the opposite of this horrific message. I didn't really mean I wanted to do whatever I was going to say that I was going to do. And obviously

I can't say in good faith, that's what they meant. I mean, clearly, I'd have to say they probably didn't mean that, but at the very least I'd say, well, there's no one right or wrong answer. But they would pull up maybe a line from a Mojipedia and go, well, this emoji, you've said here, says, may imply joking or laughter. And you go, yeah, it might. It might not. And this context, it doesn't, but it might.

So there's been other court cases where a Moji PDA gets brought up. It's one of the Jeffrey Rush, a defamation case a few years ago where a Moji PDA was sort of brought up to the judge and they were debating whether it's reputable or not to say, here's a reputable website, you're honor, and here's the emoji that my client used. And this is reputable. And then the other side's saying, not, is it reputable?

And yeah, that's the thing. People want other side say nuts. Is it reputable? And, uh, yeah, it's... That's the thing, people want a finite answer. What does this emoji mean? And... there just isn't, it's like human expression. It can mean lots of things. Have you ever had to go up on the witness stand? No. It was always the defense to what am I? And they do this little thing,

which I've never been in a position to want this, but when they do a pre-little interview, they talk to you, they pay you for your time for an hour, and they basically find different ways to ask you, this means that we're kidding, right? And then obviously an hour later, of me going, no, no, I mean, I'd have to say that it's context dependent, and do you want me to comment on this message? No, no, no, just in general, this emoji, what does it mean? I go, well, it means three different things. It could mean happy, it could mean joking,

it could mean curious. And so, funnily enough, I never got the call back from any of these people. Yeah, they're like, these won't be needing your services after all. That's almost word for word, what they would say. Or you just would hear nothing. Thank you for your time.

Please send us an invoice for your house. Well, they just send you an upside down smiley face. Yeah. What does that mean send you an upside down smiley face. Yeah. What does that mean to you, by the way? Upside down is one of the clearest to sarcasm. It's found its place on the internet is one of the few that most people mean sarcasm or the very least.

I'm not feeling it. I'm feeling a little bit up in my head today or some kind of things aren't right. You know, it's upset in some way, but sarcasm is the closest word to describe it. And thankfully, that one is mostly used in that way. I don't think there's as much confusion on that as, say, the wink or the smile. What about ones that are so passe, that are so, how do they say chuggy? Chuggy. Chuggy.

Chuggy. What about what's the most just, what's the most embarrassing emoji? I mean, it's got to be the laughing crying, right? Yeah. I mean, both, both because when people say it's overused, it is, because it is the most popular emoji. So you're going to have that. Is it the most popular?

It's still the most popular emoji. What about the tears streaming down the face? That's definitely coming in. The two of those are neck and neck, depending on which platform you're on. Okay. They're both very emotive, so they're both useful, but I think they got overdone by grandparents,

by meme pages, by corporateness. And I get it, it's very clear. I'm laughing at this. It's a ha ha emoji, but it's just, you see, it's so much it's hard to use. It's hard to use now. Do you think things start in personal chats? Maybe they go to snap chat and then they go to slack to die? Yeah corporate anything that makes you feel like you're a work has to die in your personal life. Yeah But what about the emoji that have gone so far past popular usage that not even corporate uses them anymore?

Or worse, maybe no one ever started using them. What about the least popular emoji? And who invited it to the party? Back several years ago, it was revealed that on Twitter, the aerial tramway emoji was the least use emoji of the entire emoji keyboard on the platform. And that actually drove users to use the aerial tramway emoji, to try and off its usage across the board, and remove it from being relegated as the last place emoji in the world. I'm going to quote the current head of the Unicode

emoji subcommittee, Jennifer Daniel. They've said that there's so many emojis in the emoji keyboard that, you know, don't get a lot of love maybe because they shouldn't have been turned into emojis in the first place. The emoji keyboard is a bit of a quote unquote junk drawer, but when you see one of those emojis, like for example, the chair emoji crop up, it's just a case of like, oh wow, someone's really exploring the options there. And in fact, the chair emoji was not too long ago, the subject of a bit of a viral friend

on TikTok where one influencer declared that they were going to use the chair emoji as a symbol for laughter, and it caught on for maybe 24, 48 hours. So you'd see a lot of chair emojis in TikTok comments. And of course, that was incredibly confusing. And it was just a case of this influencer's following, decided this will be a funny way to repurpose an emoji in a really kind of humorous and confusing manner. Now, that didn't sustain itself, because of of course it was based on a joke as opposed to actual utility. But even those kind of emojis like the chair you could kind of even go

like the sewing needle, the so many different emojis that are right there that are just not getting a lot of love. But when they kind of crop up, I never really grow on. I'm just like, oh cool, someone's really, really diving in deep there. Let's talk thumbs up. Why is it so passive aggressive? Why does the thumbs up get thumbs down? My feeling is the reason why people think it's passive aggressive is because the person using it is passive aggressive, right? And who thumbs up?

I mean, it's a lot of boomers, right? And their conventions are more formalized. And maybe they're being more passive-aggressive than your friends. And so it's associated with that, but you can use thumbs up, you can be a cool dude. I can use the glasses case and the thumbs up be the fun, like that's a super cool way using it.

It's like anything else, it's just you use things with intention and feeling and authenticity. And if it's not authentic, people can tell, but just like, good job on that report, thumbs up, and you're just like, oh, you too, you know? And so that is probably indicative of larger communication breakdowns than the thumbs up.

That's a great answer. What do you think is the most underused emoji? What's the one that you're like, this one even exists? Hmm. I mean, there's some rubbish symbols at the end, but all this stuff, obviously. Look what?

Even in recent years, I found some of them that I was on the committee that approved a bit boring, sort of, I know. And I'm sorry, you probably got quite a sciencey group that listened to this, but the lab coat emoji and the test tube, I mean, they're fine. They're fine. I love dogs.

But they get so little use compared to the faces and the flowers and the nature that they're like, very job-specific, let's say. What's one that you wish existed? The emoji that needs to exist that I don't think will happen, but it does need to exist. It's one that did exist on MSN Messenger. It was an open hug from one direction, and then there was a reverse one pointing the other

direction. So someone sends you something sad, all good news, anything. You can send them the open hug, and they can send you the reverse of it to hug you back. Oh, that's so reciprocal, and I love it. And that needs to exist instead. There's a boring hug of two silhouetted people hugging and that is very corporate and doesn't make anyone feel warm and fuzzy.

Some platforms make it look better than others. Google's ones are a bit clearer than Apple's, but that was one of these issues of the gender and the skin tones that if you had every man, woman, non-binary person with five different skin tones, you'd have suddenly had hundreds of hug emojis that are tiny still. Just a quick aside, just a heads up that we're going to cover this topic of diversity in emojis and representation and the purposes of emojis, say, versus avatars, and a lot more in part two when we return with your aux questions. Oh, it's so good, it's so nuanced and interesting. So come back next week for that and a whole bunch more.

OK, sorry to interrupt. We're back in. Whereas back in the day, one benefit all these early platforms had, there was so small. You couldn't really tell. But hug emoji on MSN Messenger. You couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman. They're just little pixels, right?

Yeah, no idea. So you could make yourself that person. How lucky were we that there was a germ emoji that actually was a coronavirus? That was exceptionally lucky. Apple's design was the more popular of all of them. I think the fewer of them looked a bit different early on, but yeah, what incredible timing that became that was briefly the top emoji being used. Just like that you want to talk about this new thing. It takes over the world and you've literally just approved an emoji for it. It was also a huge jump in use of the, of course, face of medical mask emoji,

which had actually existed on the emoji keyboard since the very beginning. It was actually one of the emojis that was there from some of the early sets created in Japan in the late 1990s, early 2000s. Another popular COVID emoji, the syringe and vaccinations. early sets created in Japan in the late 1990s, early 2000s. Another popular COVID emoji, the syringe and vaccinations. Do you remember though, when the syringe used to have drops of red coming out the top,

who got to decide when the syringe stopped being a tiny blood fountain? Were you on the board when they decided to make the syringe not have blood gushing out of it? Well, because the committee doesn't decide what they look like, there's this weird dance that all the companies are at the meetings, Apple's there, Google's there, Twitter's there,

they all have their own designs, but the committee doesn't really say here's what it should look like. It goes back to probably when Apple changed the gun from looking like a real weapon into a water pistol and they did that without consulting anybody. And fine, I don't have any, I have no pergun stance. It didn't bother me being the gun on the keyboard.

I think Apple thought they were doing a good thing. I think they thought, great, we will be a responsible company. There's a gun problem in America. We will remove the gun and we'll redesign it, make it look like a water gun or a water pistol. And that was complicated because it meant that other phones did not do the same thing. So I could send a toy gun to you and you could see it on your phone and see a weapon. Oh, so there's a practical issue.

And then there's also just the other companies probably feeling a bit cheesed off like, let's apple over here, like making it tough on us now. We didn't do anything. We stuck with the status quo. And now they've given us an issue. Now we have to change ours or not change ours. Like we're meeting together. Why don't we agree on these things? So the syringe that same sort of thing, I don't think the committee ever officially decided, but maybe there might have been a bit more collaboration behind the scene. Maybe a little bit more just, hey, we're thinking, maybe we might bump the blood out of this and so on.

I was going, yeah, we might do. So I think it's a bit more like that, a bit of wink nudge and see what happens. See what the big plays do. And if you're a smaller tech company, you don't have much choice. Were there any of those meetings? Were people just re-writing. Sometimes me. Really?

No, I mean, they're very collageal. Everyone's, everyone are tech professionals. And more recent years has been a more diverse group of people, sort of linguists, or lexicographers, people that bring non-tech backgrounds, which is very helpful. No, it never got a motive in the sense, but sometimes you're just saying no

to an emoji, you know, you're saying no to an emoji, and sometimes I would think some of the boring ones. I don't think I necessarily made a stand against the lab coat or the test tube, but but nonetheless, some of the boring ones I'd be more likely to say, I just, I think it's fine, but is this the priority? And sometimes you go, you do it in meeting ease, you know, you go around in circles and you bring it back and it gets retabled next month or next week. There's no, there's no fisticuffs at the board.

Speaking of discussions about what emojis look like and also what emojis we get to have. Is it all just nerds at the big conference table having polite arguments? Is there any way that you say you or I could petition to have an emoji added? I mean, what if I, and a lot of people, maybe, need a, I'm showing up to your barbecue in the leggings I slept in. Hope that's cool, emoji, or something that connotes, hey, I hope you had a good time hanging out last night.

I'm texting you after the hang to make sure that you also thought it was a good hang. How can we get one of those emojis? There's two ways to answer this question. One is Google emoji proposal and you'll find a website, unico.oric, where you follow the instructions. It's sort of like writing a dissertation though, but it's open to the general public. Anyone can write a proposal.

But it's not like change.oric. It's not like write a petition and get your signatures and once you hit a certain number it becomes an emoji. It's not, that's not how this works. It's more in the space of academia. When it comes to making new ones, who's designing them and what is the process of actually designing them? Because I imagine we use them so teeny, but they must be designed on these big monitors, right? They're like shrinky dinks, I just realized. They're like digital shrinky dinks.

You know, like that's, it's, well, they're, okay, how we answer this question, oh, I'm just thinking, without getting too wonky about designing fonts. Oh, we love that. I mean, it's true. If any podcast is gonna get wonky about designing. Yeah, get into it.

So anyone can design an emoji, right? Just like anyone can design a font. In terms of the process of designing an emoji, I mean, they're all so different. Everything from the seemingly inconsequential, like what side eye the tear should be on for this, how melted should the melty face be, or what direction should the teapot face, or what color should that bucket emoji be? There are so many different considerations. And so Phoenix. Okay. Okay. Okay. The Phoenix obviously is not a new concept.

It's been around for a long, long, long, long, long time. And its conventions are fairly similar because it exists in lots of different culture. The Phoenix emoji appears in Greek mythology. It has representation in Asian culture. On the means of all different kinds of things, obviously it can mean rebirth, but it also can mean love. It can mean nobility. It can mean a number of different things depending on its roots. It has roots in Egyptian culture and Slavic culture and Turkic culture and so the Phoenix had global representation Because it could be found in a number of different cultures around the world and throughout history So how does that influence the design? Well as you can imagine the way it looks in Chinese culture

Isn't exactly the same way it looks in Chinese culture isn't exactly the same as it is in Persian culture or in Egyptian and Turkish. And so, how do you design a phoenix that can represent all of those different cultures? And then generally, what I do is rather than saying, oh, let's pick Slavic, because they have less representation in the keyboard, which you could do. Instead, what I do is I kind of don't pick any culture over another one, and I just pick a little bit of each one. So no one's happy.

Everyone's all Frankenstein in there, but the Phoenix in terms of a symbol is iconic. Right? There are certain things that we understand it to be. It's gesture, where it's wings open, it's color, it's also generally because of the mythology around the phoenix, it's grounded in peacocks, and so the face kind of looks peacock-ish with little feathers here on the shape of the beak and the ass-shaped neck, and the rising from the ashes. And so when we were designing it, we were thinking about how it can be representative

of mini cultures and how you can design it. So it looks glorious when it's big. But also to your point legible, when it's at 12 point size in your Google doc, right? Yeah. And you have to design it in a way where just like any letter form, like the letter A, you want to make sure that whole of the letter A is big enough to be legible. And so you do that with the shape. So the shape

of the neck has enough space between the wings so that you can separate the different anatomical parts of the bird. So you're constantly looking at it big and small, you're looking at it in dark environments and in light environments because now we got dark mode, we got light mode, we got all kinds of different modes. And so all you can because you can't anticipate where emoji will appear because they appear everywhere. They're just, I don't know, like smart refrigerators now. I saw one on a UTM at Target. Like they're everywhere. What you can really do is just say like onto itself, it's the best it possibly can be and where it's most frequently appearing. When designing the emoji, we obviously read the proposal or if you're writing the proposal,

is making sure it's grounded and the right literature. And you confer with experts on the subject as a designer, it's my favorite part of the job. The anatomical heart emoji was added to talk to a cardiovascular surgeon when we were redesigning some of our marine animals. We talked to the Monterey Bay Aquarium You know, so like I get these excuses to talk to these folks that really note the space really well and figuring out That fine line between like you know, you don't need to design something that would go in anatomy textbook for a surgeon to

Something that is legible and useful and approachable and not terribly gory. That's where the third step, I didn't really mention the first and second, but it's like reading a proposal, is really anticipating its purpose in a communication context. And so sometimes that means like not embracing reality, right? It means like absolutely what how will it be visually represented? And then one part that I don't think the average designer who's proposing emoji, but I do think folks who are designing emoji fonts

do consider is how it works with other emoji in the inventory. You know, there's a new lime emoji coming. Like how do you make sure that it's not just, it's distinctive, visually distinctive, from the lemon emoji. So you really want to evaluate and consider its purpose in a communication context

and evaluate how it works with other emojis in the inventory. And then of course, another aspect of designing emoji is anticipating how other folks will design it. Because it's a font, it's not a picture. When I send it to you, I want to make sure that you're going to see something meaningfully similar as to what I do.

And so there isn't much room for creative freedom, honestly, right? You really have to be faithful to the original intent, and its purpose, and the proposal, and... Yeah. And what about the actual nuts and bolts of drawing it? purpose and the proposal and yeah. And what about the actual nuts and bolts of drawing it? I always picture those old, like, you know, animation studios from the 20s where they've got sketches of, you know,

characters we're now really familiar with. Where does it start in terms of this shape of it? I mean, it can start from anywhere. I mean, one of our artists, Fiona, she was drawing the jellyfish emoji. But by the way, the mid-dusologists are thrilled about that. So thrilled. We were working with a number of different students studying marine biology, and they looked at all the different types of jellyfish and which one because you got to pick one. Which one is gonna represent all of it? Is it a box jellyfish?

Is it, I forget the other one. Home jellyfish, yeah there's so yeah. More, you know, what are you got here right? So you really go into cartoon land and you pick something that is sort of this idea of a jellyfish rather than a literal jellyfish. And it was cheated a number of sketches around different types, different colors, different ways it could swim. And the other day, you know, you go with something that feels it is emblematic, iconic. And I mean, the software is not the most interesting,

you know, you procreate an illustrator, but then that's just the first part. You have to make a font out of it. And then there's all kinds of font software as well. Do you remember a controversy with a squid? No. Oh, vaguely, but refresh me, is there anything? It had a butt on its face.

And the person who pointed that out was a friend of mine who I met because I interviewed her for the two-thology episode. Of course. And she was one of the ones that was like, excuse me, I'm a Squid expert. And that squid has a butt on its face. Yes, I do recall this now. And this sort of thing happens.

And often it was, then me often going to companies like Apple or Google and saying, hey, someone's brought this up. Someone named Sarah McIntyre. What are you going to do about it? And often you wouldn't hear back necessarily, but you may get a heads up when it gets updated to go, by the way, you might want to check. Or not, in the end, we just got to the point

and we just checked every update religiously. So it didn't matter, you know, to MoGipedia and you Apple update would come out. Google or anything, and we were downloaded and checked, side by side, because maybe they released one, and they didn't want to tell you about it. Maybe it was something on the down low. The bagel people didn't like. The dry bagel with no cream cheese that Apple tried to release.

I get that. They briefly tried to make the peach less luscious. How dare. And people got mad. Yeah, how dare? How dare? Yeah, those are fun discussions. When you're working with Unicode, when there's a discussion about what's coming up next?

Are there any emoji that are on the chopping block like no one uses the fire hydrant like get it out of here? Anything like that that you have had to stand up for an emoji or or say no, not that one. I mean, I try to put a host conversations about it, so to give people space to explore and ask questions, some of it rhetorical, some of it grounded in actual evidence. And I try not to step in unless there needs to be something that is fact-based or clarifying or a follow-up question of some sort. And to hold ourselves accountable to our own guidelines, right? Like, if we're starting to have a discussion about something that seems to undermine a previous one or contradict something, then try to bring that up and make sure that's surfaced and appropriately addressed

because once you add an emoji, you can never remove it. They're permanent. They're permanent. So there's no runs or experimentation. It is in the unit code standard. It is a code point and they never remove the code point. It's not a problem. Wow.

Can I ask you some questions, Prolicers? Yes. Love a listener question. Now to the people. We have so many good ones. It is a boggling. So ask smart people colorful questions.

Get ready to celebrate World of Moji Day on July 17th. Get pumped about it. We'll have another episode with all of your questions. Next week, feel free to share this to anyone who has so many boggling emoji questions. It's part of our everyday life. I want to thank the guests who came on. We've linked all of their socials and the show notes. Thank you Keith, Jeremy, Jennifer. We'll hear more from them. Next week, we are at Allie Gs on Twitter and Instagram. I'm at Alli Ward. It's just one L on both also on TikTok at Alli underscore Alligies. Thank you to everyone

talking about us on Reddit. Thanks to everyone who shares the show with friends. Thanks also to people at patreon.com slash Alligies who contribute to the show. You can also contribute your questions and hear what episodes we have coming up soon. Alligies merch can be found at AlligiesMurts.com. Thank you Susanmerch can be found at oligismerch.com. Thank you, Susan Hale, for managing that and so, so much more. Thank you, Aaron Talbert, for admitting the Oligis Podcast Facebook group. Emily White of the Wordery makes our professional transcripts, and you can find that and bleeped episodes up at alleword.com slash oligis-extras.

Also we have smallegies available at alleword.com slash smallegies. They're linked in the show notes. Those are shorter, kid friendly episodes you can listen to in a classroom or with your Mima. Small Gs is worked on by Zeke Rodriguez Thomas and Mercedes-Mate Land as well as Jared Sleeper of Mind Jam Media, Kelly Art Dwyer works on alleyware.com. And while Delworth does our scheduling, additional editing was done by Mark David Christensen where Sadie's Mate Land and Jared Sleeper took the lead as lead editors on this and did an amazing job, especially since I've been traveling the last few weeks.

Love you all to bits. Also, Laurel McCall did additional research for this. So big thanks to them for so much heavy lifting on such a big episode. We'll be back next week with Part 2. Nick Thorburn wrote and performed the theme music. If you stick around to the end of the episode I'll tell you a secret. And this week's secret is that I was just gonna open my phone to tell you what my most used emoji is and I realized that my phone is dead. It's only two in the afternoon. Why is my phone dead already? So I'm I'm at like four goblins but

that's fine. You're just gonna have to wait until next week to find out. Also when I was on Catalina Island last week teaching those climats scientists about psychom who are lovely, I missed a spot on my face, on my upper forehead to hairline, where I did not use enough sunscreen snorkeling, and now it is peeling. And so let this be a note to cupping texture crush, we're all going to die. And also bangs do offer sun protection, so don't let's not forget that. But you do whatever you like, that's the whole point. Do whatever you like. Okay, text your crush if you want. Ask them what their favorite emoji is. Okay, bye bye. Thank you.