Ologies with Alie Ward - Curiology (EMOJI) Part 2 with Various Emoji Experts

Episode Date: July 12, 2023

The thrilling conclusion of all-things-emoji! Eggplants, peaches, jumping ska dudes, gray hearts, family emojis, what NOT to text your Southern Italian friends, yellow hands, red hair, the birth of the smiley face and how to celebrate World Emoji Day on July 17 with Emojipedia founder Jeremy Burge, designer Jennifer Daniel, and the world’s first emoji translator (and current Emojipedia editor-in-chief) Keith Broni. Listen to Part 1 first, of course. 📙 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 again. L.Y. Ward, why the same intro? Because we're back, part two of Curiosity. Dual episodes on emoji or emojis. You can say it either way. I'm not the boss of you, but we do talk about it in part one. So no matter what, start with part one.

So last week's episode covered emoji versus emoticons, how they're actually fonts and not pictures, how they get standardized, the meanings of the more mysterious emoji, how meanings change very swiftly, and how experts keep track of them without wanting to go hide in a cave forever because it's too much work. And now this episode, we get to patron-specific questions, which were submitted by the folks who support the show at patreon.com slash allergies, but you can join for one shiny dollar a month. You can also support the show just by telling a friend or leaving a review, and I read all of them, including one

just left by Lena the Queen, who said that they have a tiny dog with dementia, who's very scurred of thunder and fireworks. But somehow they write, quote, I put on a podcast, only allergies works, and their dog slowly nods off in the blissful sleep of animal dreams and leg twitches, while Ali teaches him things he will immediately forget. Lean to the Queen, thank you for the review, it's an honor to be in his ears and also yours and everyone's. Okay, curiosity, part two, let's get into it.

The etymology and bios of all the guests are in the intro of part one, start there, it's linked right in the show notes. But for now, let's talk about how many emojis they are, who uses emojis? What emoji have to do with your sex life? Introverts versus extroverts? Representation in emoji, which emoji are coming up soon? The eggplant that ghosts the bucket, and so much more. With a perfect gaggle of emojipedia, editors,itors, Past and Present, Unicode, Members, Scholars,

Designers, Enthusiasts and Cureologists because yes there are three guests again, Jennifer Daniel, Keith Brony and Jeremy Birch. Can I ask you some questions from listeners? Yes, love a listener question. Okay, good. Adam Silk wants to know, as well as Amanda Smith, Super Sarah, Jen Low-Rodz, first time question asker, Lena Quinn, and Steeping Films. Wanted to know, in Adams words, what was the first emoji? Steeping films, aka Erica Hool wants to know, are cave paintings considered the OG emojis?

When do emoji start? So emoji period started 2013, so we only had 2013 onwards. After a few years it became my mission to go back to Japan and I was a good excuse to have some nice sushi and a bit of a travel round, but also to track down people who are there because these people are alive today, right? People who designed some of the original sets and people who worked at these companies and track down these earliest phones and pages were the origin in Japan. And the first emoji that we can track back,

and I'm always happy to revise this if we find earlier, but the first emoji we could track back was to a Pager in 1997, which was a love heart. Oh, really? One, a single emoji on the whole Pager, you could beep through a message and then put a heart there if you wanted to. Doesn't that say everything about what humans can be?

We should have stopped there. Thanks for not for that. Yes. Do you have a heart that you like? Because you know how there's a heart that's in the deck of cards. There's the red heart. There's the sparkle heart. Some people just do a light white heart.

They do. Yeah, I remember John Mayer. I think was joking about only using the card's based heart because it was more manly or something. But I'd always got people taking it. It's the internet, but then people take it seriously than that email or message emoji pd to be like, John Mayer's over here saying,

this is the only alpha, hard, tell him he's wrong. He was clearly joking. It was a funny tweet. No, I'm more than happy with the red love heart. I'm happy to share that around. I know some people feel a bit squeamish and they go, oh, it's a bit corporate, can't send a love heart. Might send the wrong message.

I'll send a blue heart. Blue heart turned out to be the corporate heart when we did an analysis at a MoGPDR. No. Corporate brands use the blue heart more than any of the others. There's very little difference otherwise. They mostly just get a random mix where they're all popular. The black one gets some goth association.

I get it. Okay, this came up talking to Jennifer because y'all I am a champion for that emoji. I love the black heart. When the black heart came out I was like, finally, I'm gonna use the black heart. The black heart is definitely with a certain subset of friends. I feel like it's my old school friends, people have known longer, people that I was got with, definitely. Sometimes, if I'm tweeting about a bug or a spider or an affinity for something, you know what I mean, that's a little bit more of an underdog, culturally, some kind of critter than it's definitely getting the

black heart. For sure. More on the chromatics of curiosity in a bit, but first, which one is Jeremy's favorite? We all have a favorite heart, right? I feel like I know this in my own real heart. I just like the red one, although my favorite, the red one with the little dot underneath, it's a heart exclamation mark. No, is that what that is? That's what that's meant.

No one knows that's what it is one knows that's what it is. But that's what it is. And that's how I use it, whereas I'm sending an excited message where I'm happy and it's something I like, I might finish it off with a hard exclamation mark at the end. I've been using the pink cart with sparkles. Yep, I do. I really love using the hearts with other sort of gestural emoji.

Like, there's this explosion emoji. I think it's called collision. It is really spiky. Uh-huh, yeah. Like a heart exploding. Oh, next to each other. Okay, so there are well over 20 different heart emoji options. Growing all the time, there's so many ways to say,

I like you, or I almost love you. Or wait, no, I'm obsessed with you, but in a devoted and safe and not possessive way. Or thank you for buying our sandwiches. There's a lot of them. And there's a new pink one, right? Yes, there's three new colored hearts, like blue, gray, and pink. Oh, wait, why the gray heart? So we did a big analysis of cross-linguistic color theory. And I mean, this is what makes the emoji work.

Continually interesting. OK, so if you look at literature in cross-linguistic study, it suggests that there's a maximum of 11 basic color terms. And as languages kind of develop, the names for these colors become present in the language. So stage one would be dark, cool, and light warm. So things like black and white. And then the next phase is red. And then the third phase is either green or yellow.

And the fourth phase is both green and yellow. The next phase is blue, then brown. And then the last one is purple, pink, orange, and gray. Okay, just a color theory wormhole side note for context and also intrigue. All right, so a lot of things happened in 1969, such as moon landings and woodstock and your grandparents smoking hash.

But another event was the publication of basic color terms. Their universality and evolution, which was written by anthropologist Overton Brent Berlin and linguist Paul K. Okay, this was a big deal because it was the first major global study of, hey, what do you call this color in a bunch of different languages? And essentially Berlin and K found that different cultures have more or fewer words for colors, but they tend to add them in the same order, as Jennifer said. You got two words for color, you're probably saying black and white. You got three words for color, you probably identified red. Next colors that are added to language typically are green or yellow, then blue tends to get adopted into the language

and then your browns, and then the last major color words to be added linguistically are usually purples and pinks and oranges and gray. Now English has 11, which for Lenin K noted were white, black, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange, and gray. But there are many languages that, for example, don't make a hard line between green and blue on the chromatic spectrum, and might describe the sky as a pale green color, or bamboo as a shade of yellow. And why even- but why who's talking about this? Who cares? Well, I love a mess, and there's a big debate because of this paper in terms of the concepts universalism and relativism. Berlin and Key argue that humans are all biologically so similar that, of course, we would add colors in the same order. They

are universalists. Others take the relativism side and say that because different cultures may not differentiate between terms the same, color perception is really a cultural phenomenon. And if you want to fall into a rainbow-colored rabbit hole, just find the Wikipedia page titled Linguistic Relativity and the Color Naming Debate, because it is a hot debate. And it of course influenced a bunch of emoji experts while they were drafting up new hearts. And so when you're looking at these 11 basic color terms, what we were missing were those last two pink and gray. And so, you know, when there's like, how many colors exist in the world? How much can the eye perceive?

You have to kind of have a constraint there. And so these 11 basic color terms are a way of creating a closed set of colors. And gray was amongst them. And is that a way for someone to express affection or maybe approval in a non-horny way? Because I think gray is the least horny heart. I feel like if your boss sends you a get well soon with a gray heart, you're probably not

gonna take it the wrong way, right? I don't know. I feel like gray heart is like devoid of color and all love. Like, I feel like gray heart. Like you've been drained of great things, right? Makes me feel nothing. I feel nothing. I mean, you could think of it a couple of different ways.

It could be a silver kind of thing, where you use it in that manner. It is also commonly found in sports team color spaces. Oh. I kind of think a sports team that has silver. Like a raiders, a raiders would definitely be. Exactly. Right. If anyone's out there just

emerging about the raiders, they're like, yes, because you're not gonna get sports mascots within the standard, right? There's no brands, there's no logos. So the colored hearts can represent an abstraction of your affinity, right? It can also be used like silver fox, like silver heart of fox or something kind of goth

of thinking like black and white films, you know, like the gray heart would work. How do you feel about the update with at least I'm messaging where you can respond via holding down the message and then you can do an explanation, you can do a question mark. Do you feel like that stole the thunder of emojis or do you, like, it's such a limited menu? I think it's great and helpful, but yeah, you're right. There's not enough.

I need a clap at the very minimum. Someone tells you good news, thumbs up, blah, blah, awful. Hot, nice, but still a bit like a bit like, you're not excited for me, like that's lovely, dear. Yeah, yeah. And the exclamation point sometimes can come off as incredulous. Like, you won that? Root. And you're like, no, no, I'm just saying like, that is amazing. I've literally had someone before now, go, what do you mean? I've sent the exclamation mark as excited and have a friend go, what do you mean by that? I'm like, what are you talking about? Clearly, I'm happy for you. What else is this meant to mean? So you're right, that needs more options, clapping.

And I don't like that it says, ha ha There's no, I know laughing crying is cringe, but like, just give the option for all of them. There are some iOS updates coming this year allowing you to do more with the whole set. That was something announced last week. So later in the year, there'll be more options than a bit differently, but the same sort of idea. That's so good to know.

Okay, because I need that. Some people, Lee, Katie Murray, Ann Ebi, and Scarlett Ponder, all asked about people who use more emojis. Lee wants to know if there's certain personality types that use them more. Katie said that they once read that people who use more emojis are more sexually frustrated and read that that means you have a higher IQ.

Okay, because you needed to know, there was a 2015 study by the Lauderd, Rutgers University anthropologist Dr. Helen Fisher and it involved analyzing data from over 5,000 singles in America via match.com and the TLDR is that yes, people who used emojis did the business more than non-emogitarians. 54% of emoji users had sex in the year prior, while only 31% of non-emoji users did. And apparently, the more emojis used, the more sexual happened. Which ones? You're asking for a friend? Oh, the wink, the smile, and the kiss emojis. Got the most play. And Dr. Fisher told Time Magazine at the time that quote, emoji users don't just have more sex.

They go on more dates and they are two times more likely to want to get married. What? And if you're like, well, okay, that was eight years ago, we should replicate it. Someone did because people care. And in 2019, there was a follow-up study titled, worth a thousand interpersonal words, emoji as effective signals for a relationship oriented digital communication. So they analyzed more survey data and found, yes, indeed, passed a first date emoji use with potential partners is associated with maintaining connection and more romantic and sexual interactions. So there you go.

But what if you're not single or not looking to mingle in the nude? So there was another study in 2021, titled, Tune in on Cender's Self-Revelation, emoji and emotional intelligence influence interpretation of WhatsApp messages. And that one found that just no matter who you are or what you want, emoji in texts act as self-revelations instead of just merely factual exchange.

And that emoji may provide cues necessary to extract emotional information from texts. And emotionally intelligent recipients seem to be especially responsive to that. So people are picking up what you are putting down, especially in emoji form. So don't be ashamed to use something that expresses how you feel, because science says it can clear up miscommunications, it can lead to bonding and boning because of bonding.

Scarlett Ponder said that they often have moments when they say, I really struggle to pick an emoji face that feels like it fits my current emotion. I'm neurodivergent, slash autistic, and I wondered if my struggle to find the correct emoji could be related to my differences in how I feel and express emotion. Do you ever hear that different people gravitate toward emojis differently? We definitely had a lot of neurodivergent people appreciating emoji media because they liked the fact it said, here is this this face and here's what it means. And obviously there's some wiggle room there,

but that was a popular use for it. Who do you think is drawn to them more? Right, people want to put people in a box and figure out which age group uses emojis the most. And men or women, and it's very hard to get good data on this sort of thing, especially as so much of it's in private chats that we don't have access to.

My impression is that it's people who are better communicators, more sensitive, possibly leaning towards women, which makes sense, but it's hard to get the data to back that up. That's my opinion having seen the types of users we get it tends to be people who care about being clear in their emotions. They want to have it and they're not afraid

and some tech tech older men. I think it's not as much of a thing now, but we used to get some angry older tech commentators who like one of them blocked us on the internet. Just for, I don't know, just sort of calling it a thing for only for kids and they just get personally upset by it. And that was, only ever saw men get upset by that.

I never saw women going, duh, emojis. Yeah. That's right. Okay, so let's take the 2018 paper through a gender lens, learning usage patterns of emoji from large-scale Android users. So researchers did see a statistical difference between how different genders used emojis to the point that given just the emoji in a message, no text, an AI could accurately predict the sender gender 81% of the time. How? How do they? How did it do that? What's the tell? Well, the laugh cry emoji was the most

popular emoji across all genders, but men tended to favor the streaming tears emoji more than women, and men toss in the monkey with covered eyes one more, but the blushing smile less frequently than women. Okay, what about other agendas or just our personalities? All right, there was a 2018 publication mining the relationship between emoji usage patterns and personality. And it looked at, get this, 1.13 billion tweets. And it found that the folks using more emoji,

they had to have been like the loud heart on sleeve, heart eyes on sleeve extroverts, right? No, the people using more emojis, introverts. And the researchers say introverted people tend to use more emoji because they prefer implicit visual context over explicit texts where they have to express themselves more directly. So introverts use more emojis. Are you an extrovert? Well, you might use them as well, but go for the more positive leaning emojis. And people who score high on agreeableness and

personality tests use emoji to lighten the mood and add humor. But if you're neurotic, for example, if you're me, we tend to use more exaggerated and emotion-rich emojis, which is just brutally accurate. Anyone who has received a text from me has probably gotten the anguished face one like the wailing open mouth crying one you know you've gotten that for me I'm on a deadline anguish face are we out of lucroy anguish face me admitting this anguish face plus maybe like a little thumbs up emoji and then maybe I send one

that's a wink like I'm okay um scarletonder and Keaton Sant both had questions along that line, Keaton once said, when will it finally be considered professional to use emojis and emails? Because a girl can only use so many exclamation marks before I seem insane. So what about in corporate settings, in professional settings?

Is the tide turning where it is appreciated that you send a skull or a question mark or a shirog emoji. I think people wait for the first person. No one wants to be the first one to send it. And once the flood gates are over, and then it goes back and forth a bit. So I'm sure it depends on your workplace. Don't put it in your contract or lower or whatnot,

but I think we're fine. I don't think anyone who is getting annoyed or offended by an emoji in an email, I don't know if I want to work with them. That's a very good point. Yeah. Maybe you don't have a choice. Maybe you're in a job, but you don't have a choice. But I say, go for it. And if they don't like it, they'll get over it. You obviously get a pass. You should be using it. If you send an email without an emoji,

it seems like that would be an issue. But have you seen any kind of corporate culture or workplace culture change toward emoji to help clear up misunderstandings, anything like that? Oh, absolutely. Yeah, for sure. I mean, there's just so many different examples I can come to mind. I think it's not a unique situation to emoji.

I mean, even if you go back just a few years, the use of punctuation could be seen as unprofessional. Too many exclamation points. Really, I don't even know, like all caps. And this is, again, another form of policing language and telling people like, OK, no, there are rules and conventions to subscribe to. But if you look at how people play with language,

whether it be informal settings, like maybe a work email to informal ones, like just having a conversation, like the people who play with language tend to skew female, right? And so it's about policing how people speak. And those people who'd like to experiment tend to get policed more, but they're also the ones that get to explore and try to figure things out and be authentic as well. That's such a good point. I every time I meet someone, it is, they always give me an example,

either something they hate about emoji, or something they love about emoji, but at the end of the day, I think effectively, one of the reasons they're so commonly used is because they are functional. They're not really decorative. And so because they provide some sort of utility, this hard to argue not using them because they are helpful.

The whole other space about a module that is worth at least acknowledging in some short way, which is the video use case. Like you and I talking right now, it is so helpful for me to see you nodding your head. You're like communicating to me without saying words. You're smiling. I know that we're connecting on some level. If that wasn't here, I'd be left to my imagination. It's very hard on me. Yeah, I'm not communicating and I don't get it. Unless I heard laughter, that would be helpful. But, you know, emoji in digital spaces are this way of back channeling in the same way as gesture does.

So like when someone takes notes when you're talking, you're like, oh, I said something interesting. Yeah. Like we've evolved to laugh for a reason. Yeah. Connect with people into overcome that digital divide. It's not that those have to be emoji anymore, but emoji have been

with us long enough where you don't need to reinvent the wheel. And then when there's not emoji in there, I feel constipated. You're like, what's happening here? I think it was person that I like what they're saying. I have no way of doing it. And it's yeah, it's a, it makes a big difference. Ultimately, this is something that researchers in the linguistic space have been trying to say about, not exclusively emojis, but kind of texting in general, is that texting is not pros. Texting is an attempt to convey speech, naturalistic speech, in a written format.

People are much looser with grammar when it comes to texting, and there is a whole different kind of tonal register involved. For example, in prose, of course, we're always clarifying the matter in which someone is stating something. So she said quietly. she said energetically, she said with a dour expression, nobody you know dictates their emotion in a text where you would say fine, he said disappointedly. You know people will perhaps use parenthesis or an emoji. They'll use a variety of different parallel linguistic tools to try and create a sense of emotional context

within these text messages or social media posts, this version of writing, which is distinct from prose. It's much more casual. And what we're doing in those contexts is attempting to bring some of the nonverbal information that we have at our disposal when we're speaking face to face or indeed visual medium or even when we're speaking voice to voice over a phone there's so much information that's being conveyed by the tone of voice that someone is using or even the pauses that are

utilized during a conversation. Emogies our attempt, or rather they're being used as our attempt to try and bridge that gap or fill that gap in communication. That's not to say they're a literal one-to-one analog, like no one is literally crying laughing when they use the crying laughing face in the same way that no one's, you know, flesh is melted off their face when they're using the skull, but they are semantic cues that we interpret in the same way we would posture, expression, tone of voice, et cetera. Oh, I'm gonna look and see if there's anyone who asked

about like dating apps. Now you're married? I am married. I didn't mean to sound that in a satellite. I am married, that's disappointing. I haven't really sound that in a satellite. I am married. It's disappointing. I haven't got to use the dating apps. You haven't.

How long have you been with your partner? I've been with my partner since before dating apps. So being together since I was 21 or so and this is now 17 years. 17 years? Yeah, I guess so. So your relationship predated, oh no, I used too many emojis. Correct. During courtship.

Yeah, we were sort of the days of text message and phone call. Like this is, yeah, early days. So I missed the whole scene, although definitely a big contingent of people looking up emojis were more 16 year olds being like, what does this mean? What does it mean when your crush sends you? Because we get like logs through as well of this search field. But when people are typing in things literally like, yeah, what does it mean when you're crushed send you? Because we get like logs through as well of this search field, but when people are typing in things literally like, yeah, what does it mean if you're crushed send you these? Oh, oh, oh. And you're like, well, it doesn't mean necessarily anything.

Hopefully it's good. They're messaging you. That's good. Yeah, that's true. Any communication is good. Yeah. Lena Brodsky and Stephanie Trauperman wanted to know how often do the current emojis get updated?

And Stephanie says, just curiosity. Curiosity. Is it random or do they do like quarterly or yearly? Because I sometimes, the only thing that gets me to update my software on my phone is when I'm getting the question mark in a box emoji. I'm like, I don't know what the fuck you're saying right now. So I gotta, I have to turn my phone off and update it.

It wasn't even built deliberately like that, but it was a huge driver. You're right, that the social push, when you get that first message where you don't know what the emotion is. Yes. And it's so ambiguous that, especially if you get a message that could go either way depending the emoji.

So the committee approves one list every year, and then roughly once a year, each major tech company will add the new ones. And they might tweak the appearance of some existing ones. It do you know what is coming up next? Do you hear murmurings? I've been like, they're working on this. You know what, they're pretty, if you care,

you can look it up. The ones that I have been involved in seeing come out, they are out now, the light pink heart and the light blue heart, those were released in the most recent update. Those are probably the last batch that I was sort of in the committee when they were being discussed and big fan of the pink heart coming out. The next year's list, I think it's in draft already and I think I glanced at it once, but I've been too retired to pay attention. But if you look at it, it's called emoji15.1.

You can Google it. You'll find a page on Unicode or a MoGPDR, and it will say the draft list being considered. Hell yes, I look this up. And 15.1, the list. It has the upcoming icons. And included are some cool accessibility ones, like a manual wheelchair, there's a motorized wheelchair, there's people walking with white canes, there's also folks kneeling and nodding and shaking heads. There's that Phoenix bird that's gonna drop, they got a lime, there's a broken chain link coming and also a mushroom,

but a brown one. Not the Aminita's red speckled mushroom kind. So these are due to come out September 2023. And if you're listening after that Just know I'm a person speaking to you from the past when the only emoji that we had for mushroom was a hallucinogenic And toxic kind, but finally we're living in a world with brown mushroom emoji Which can still be extremely hallucinogenic and incredibly toxic, but my colleges, I know you're happier Who isn't happy? Probably Betsy a patron who asked where are the curly ginger will be extremely hallucinogenic and incredibly toxic. But my colleges, I know you're happier. Who isn't happy? Probably Betsy, a patron who asked,

where are the curly ginger girls? Betsy, it's just not our time. A bunch of people wanted to know when our redheads gonna get their due. So that's so funny. Okay, so, oh, Ellie. Oh, I'm not a natural redhead. I'm absolutely an aposter.

This is not genetic at all. No, this is the answer that really falls short. There is a redheaded emoji. I didn't know that. But it doesn't apply to all the gestures. So you're looking at the people's section. You got a baldie. You got someone with curly hair You got a red head. I think you even got a like a silver fox in there as well

They are more portraits got it. You can't make a red-headed doctor Mm-hmm. You make a red-headed face palm And so this is where the delineation between Representation of how you look between representation of how you look versus representation of how you feel. And when you think about how you feel, it's not that it is completely divorced from how you look because they are sometimes the same thing. But when it comes to emoji, it's a font. How many unlocks can you add to one character? And so the amount of customization that a font can afford you

really falls short of when you start going into avatar land. And you want to be able to make something with the gap in your teeth or your color glasses or your color hair. And so I subscribe to less realism, then more. And so rather than adding more physical attributes to our keyboard, because you can never attain actual inclusion, if you pursue that route, because how many people are in the world? That's how much customization would need to be keyboard. And so I tend to lean more towards deviating from reality and abstraction. It's been talked about.

It has been talked about a lot. The issue is those numbers, right, that you multiply out if every person writes, so you have hundreds of humans already with different skin tones. Right now, the skin links to the hair. You get a white person, they get dark hair, you get the next skin tone up, they get blonde hair and you go on and you go on. But if you wanted to have every combination with red hair, you're adding hundreds of new emojis.

If you add red and curly, hundreds more again. And even though it seems like I got no big deal because all the modern platforms got filters and stuff, the way emojis are done as a font, they're kind of like this old school tech where it's loaded in memory the whole time and there are real limits on how many you can have in a practical sense. And that's all it is. It's just a numbers game. And in reality, if you say added white hair, curly hair, red hair, being three big ones

that people wanted to see. If you added it to every set, it would be, yeah, literally hundreds, thousands even. And that's not what the platforms want. How many emojis are there now? So over 3,000, I'm gonna say, yeah, over 3,000, it's over 3,500 even. I'm gonna say 3,600 and something.

He's right around there, correct. But what did the first Apple upgrade, like I remember updating my software? You do just had a few hundred at that stage. But having said that, this thousand sounds really big, but so many of them are skin tone variations, gender variations, every human emoji now has 18 characters because you have a little weight lift of person.

And you go, that's very nice, but they're yellow. And then you push and hold and you go, okay, great, I can make it a man. I can make it a woman. I can make it gender neutral and five skin tones and the yellow one. So 3,500 and something does sound like a lot. We get a lot of flavors within that.

You do, you do, yeah. And who is pushing for that kind of progress? Cause I feel like once we start to see it on the keyboard, it feels like, okay, can this affect social change? Right. There was definitely a big few years there where no one was in the wrong. Everyone meant well, I will say. There was definitely this sort of situation where you looked at the keyboard

and it made no sense because it was just independently made by different people in Japan. So you'd look at it and it ostensibly was sexist. You had men in professions, you had a police officer, as a man, you had a hairdresser, as a woman, you know, you had a man doing construction, you had the woman doing some kind of yoga pose, you know. So like it's obvious, you transport that out of Japan, you make it worldwide, you look at the keyboard and you go, what is going on here? Yeah.

So then rightly so, people complained and they complained to Apple in particular, even though they're one of the people in the committee, people from Apple, but also people from Google, Microsoft, me, I was on the committee for a while. Rightly so, people look at that and go, that's not fair, why can't we have men and women to all the jobs and it started a long 5, 6, 7-year trend of trying to patch up things, which temporarily helped,

but it just added more questions. You end up then with going, well, why not red hair? Why not curly hair? Why should the women have long hair? Women don't have to have long hair. Women could, you know, look what it like, however they want to look like, which is very valid. It's just trying to fix a difficult beginning. So the end result, possibly looking back, should have been ditch of the humans. Good bye, little humans. Take the humans out. There's no way. There's two diverse. There's too many people. The more variations you add, the more it looks like you're leaving someone out deliberately. And that's fair, I get it. I'm not saying have only white men doing

the jobs in the list, I'm just saying that no matter how many variations you make, someone is going to get left out, and maybe in those early meetings, maybe it would have been a good idea to go, you know what, there's only about eight humans at the moment. Why don't we just sort of bury them, no more humans, but that's hindsight flags for another issue as well, geopolitical issues that you don't think of it. You look at the emoji keyboard and you go, oh, cute, where's my flag?

But you don't think of the difficult discussions around separatist regimes. And if two different rebelling forces say, this is the flag, it's just an emergency, but it's complicated. It's complicated. So when I am part of the subcommittee, thinking about what our priorities are, I look a lot at where things could be fixed,

which is kind of looking backwards, as a way for us to really, really advance and move forwards. So for example, a number of years ago, I was texting someone literally in a meeting. She was standing right next to me. And obviously I was shit talking the meeting and texted her something like love a good mansplain with, you know, a person in the face bombing. And I could see her phone and it rendered as a man instead of a woman.

I know exactly. I was just like, what? Give me your phone. And so she had my phone and I had an Android. And I was like, oh, understand what's happening here. And so when I looked into it, code points, it came down to the code points. So there was a code point for a man face bombing,

a code point for a woman face calming, and then a third code point for face calming. Oh, gender not specified. Mm-hmm. And what some designers did was they're like, what does that mean? Oh, I just make it a man. No. And then for others, I don't know, let's just make it a woman. So this existed for a long time. Oh my God. The thing I did was like, okay, did a big audit.

It said, okay, where the difference is, I'm sending you a merman. You're seeing a merman. Or I'm sending you a merman. You're seeing a merman. And then wrote a number of proposals, lots of documentation around the problems that was creating and how to fix it. And that's how we got our set of gender inclusive emoji was, it's already existed. So Plohunt was the original proposal of those code points, but the problem was in the implementation.

No one knew what to do with that. I don't know what this means. And so now we have these gender inclusive designs. One of the first things I did was this big audit. We added a lot of new characters for it, but it didn't stop there. When we start looking at skin tone, I would, you know, like, all the hands have skin tone except for handshake. Oh, the deal with that, right?

So now our handshake has not just a universal tone applied to it, but you can change the left hand and the right hand. We also have a number of different couples with different skin tones now, et cetera. But the one that was glaring was the family emoji. Yes, and I love when those came up, it was so heartening to see all these different types of families at least. I do feel like when emojis sort of go into territory that is more inclusive, I feel like it normalizes and makes a society more inclusive.

And I think that that's so validating and wonderful to see. Well, this is the trap that you fall into is that you say, okay, the atomic family doesn't exist anymore. There are many different ways to have a family. So we're gonna add a bunch of those different ways. But the world has changed a lot since those were added just, I don't even, less than 10 years ago, maybe just slightly around 10 years ago. And now, even then, those were not the most inclusive,

I mean, they're just really obvious. When you talk about a family, what is a family? And now, even then, the most inclusive, they're just really obvious. When you talk about a family, what is a family? It doesn't even have to include children. It can just be two people. It could be your grandparents. It could be two people in a dog. It could be one person in three cats.

Cats, cats, and more cats. More importantly, should not be prescribed by your keyboard. And while it is an important symbol symbol and to your point, it's validating to see, I just think that the diversity of those families didn't result in inclusion of many others. And so when I was looking at the family emoji, first I looked at how they were being used, which is to say no one uses them. Oh, you look at the people out of Gory as a whole, at the very bottom is families and wrestlers. wrestlers also, at least people are used to melging.

So, you know, there's another different things, you know, you've been asked why don't you use these, or why do you use them? Are people not using them because there's no skin tone affordance, is it because they're overly specific? Like, maybe your family has redheads? Ha ha ha! What is it?

Like is it because it's such a literal representation of family, if it can't capture your family literally, it falls short. And so one answer to this would be, okay, let's just add all the skin tones to these characters, which would result in over 7,000 new emoji.

Ah, yeah, because it's so specific. Yes, it just, and our keyboards are already bloated with slightly over 3,000 right now, and to add that many foreign emoji that isn't used very frequently is out of sync with just the whole mission. It's so personal, right? It's hard. So like, one angle is to add all of the code points, which I proposed. It was like a 10 page paper and it was like, here, this is what they would look like. And it was kind of, like, you're like, hey guys, this is what we're looking at. Yeah. And the response to that was like, no, that's crazy. The blog designers will be designing these family emoji for the next three years if we add this many.

And people don't even use them, we can't do it. I was like, well, it's not acceptable to have these emoji in our keyboards and they have no skin tone support. If it looks like a person, according to the Unicode standard, it needs to have skin tone support. And so in the next emoji release

we're actually removing all signifiers of physical representation from the emoji. So what you'll have is more like airport signage kind of characters. Like to adult looking folks, you could just say they're bigger and then to smaller looking people, you could say their children. So we're making them into symbols. And that is far more inclusive from a font perspective, not an avatar. I think avatars are great. Love me an avatar. But from a font perspective, the more detail you remove,

the more you can project yourself onto it. Yeah. Like a drawing of a smiley face, I can relate to that versus a picture of a very specific man smiling. Yeah. Leaning more into this space, I really do think has more benefit to more people than the opposite angle, which really upsets every redhead. Okay, so I'm a fake redhead. So I feel like as a known imposter, I don't really get a vote on this, but if they did add it, I'd give it a little thumbs up, a little heart, or maybe I do a wow reaction, which side note,

if you've been on Facebook and hit different reactions, those are called react cheese. Facebook added those react cheese in early 2016 after Slack did it a year earlier, and now all kinds of sites from Twitter to link in offer a menu of reactGs for the times when typing out, hey, that pisses me off. Or ship balls, man, that sucks. I'm sorry. Just takes too much of our time. So as World Remote G day approaches July 17th, you can celebrate these tiny pictures you

use to avoid confusion and make someone fall in love with you. And each week we donate to a charity of theologist choosing, and this week it's going to the non-profit Unicode, a group of mostly volunteers who work to make sure emojis are unified, and inclusive, and accessible to all, and they're linked in the show notes. And on July 17th, which is the date on the little tiny calendar in emoji land, you can raise a glass of something to the people who decide what the emoji glasses look like. And that donation was made possible by sponsors apologies. Okay, back to your questions, including as promised, gossip that we can pry out of these experts.

I don't think the committees feel like responsibility for human communication overall, but I mean, it comes up like a cockroach emoji was proposed and it got approved. But I was sort of a bit concerned that sometimes people refer to some people as cockroaches in a way that you can't police how people use something, but you still have to weigh it up. Is this more useful to write at the not? There would definitely be ones that come along where you kind of think,

this is definitely intended in a good way, but cannot be used in a bad way. Yeah, it can be weaponized. Right, I mean, there's for instance, I guess one I recall, I don't remember anyone on a committee mentioning this, but publicly people would say, well, we were considering proposals for a man wearing a wedding dress as an example, which has been approved. There are now, there's a man in a wedding dress, a woman in a wedding dress, and a ambiguous person in a wedding dress. But some people would tell me, I'm worried that people make fun

of the transgender community, but people might, it's a valid concern. I haven't actually seen a bee used like that, thankfully, but it could have been, and you have to weigh it up. I wouldn't, it's so funny, because it's so in the eye of the holder, I'm like, it's sweet, that's amazing. I for't, it's so funny because it's so in the eye of the boulder, I'm like, it's sweet! That's amazing!

I for one think that's wonderful, but of course I didn't think about its misuse. Also, think about the skin tone in your emoji. Do you customize it to the color of your skin or do you just leave it as the stock color? And why is that the stock color? Curly Fry wanted to know who decided to make the universal character yellow, like the kind of Simpsons yellow, when that was decided what the universal kind of tone would be, what were the discussions like? Well, that predates me. I think you can reasonably assume that the yellow is referencing the classic yellow smiley face of the 60s.

It's also not yellow. it's supposed to be gold. But you know, you could look at the Japanese phone carriers. Those emoji actually weren't gold at all. They were like magenta. So, because there was no, you know, there's old Nokia phones. Yes. They were beautiful. But it was a tone that felt not realistic, abstracted.

And I mean, if I was in the room, I'd be looking at legibility. Like, yellow is not terribly legible color. I do think though that it was probably grounded in some convention that existed before it. I always figured they just kind of poached that from the Simpsons. People do feel that the yellow is a synonym for whiteness, as opposed to being truly neutral. And that is perhaps largely informed by how in the Simpsons, one of the longest running

television programs of all time, yellow means white because there is representation of different race within the Simpsons, and all those people aren't yellow. They have darker skin tones or lighter skin tones. So that is a huge element of it as well. Can you imagine getting to get a PhD and the granularity of these issues? Dr. Alexander Robertson of the University of Edinburgh School of Informatics can. So this docs PhD dissertation from 2022 is titled Expression and Perception of Identity Through Skin-Toned Emoji. In an addition to outlining the history of emoji, invented by Shakyutaka, Corita in the

late 1990s, it also includes a very recent research about TME or tone-modifiable emoji. Dr. Robertson draws on research from their previously co-authored paper, Black or White, but never neutral, how readers perceive identity from yellow or skin-authored paper, Black or White, but never neutral. How readers perceive identity from yellow or skin-toned emoji, which found in their surveys and their studies that the yellow-handed emoji are not, in fact, perceived as neutral, but as white. And Dr. Robertson writes, we suggested one possible reason is that the yellow color is more visually similar to the lighter tones associated with the white identity than to the darker tones associated with the black

identity. However, it is also possible that the association with white has less to do with visual similarity than with the fact that the yellow emoji is the default and within the British sociocultural context, white is the historically dominant in default category they write. And yes, we will link Dr. Alexander Robertson's paper on our website, it's fascinating. Oh, and just as an overall note from earlier,

some folks use the term Caucasian, but a lot of people don't know that the very word has pretty racist roots. So white works, white gets the point across. And on that note, patron Super Sarah said, I figure the yellow smiley face themed emojis are based off the original 1960s-ish smiley face. And a reason why it was yellow or why we continued to use yellow? Well, where did the iconic smiley face come from? I feel like that was definitely the first emoji

that comes to people's minds. But where does that fit into human history? Is that from the 60s? What I would say is that yes, there is some contest about this. And there are at least two different people who claim that this is the original smiley, one of which, you say what you want about this,

but this is the smiley company claims that they have the origin, that they are one of the first people that they are now a big company. And it's as far as I can see, there is a long history going back more than 100 years of smiley faces that people can find prior art in print. I think up to 200 years ago, it's just one of those things I'd imparryllown if you showed newspaper clippings from different countries. Who is the inventor? I don't think there's a definitive answer.

Yeah, okay. So this has a complex kind of juicy history from the very first ever found simple smiley face dating back to 1700 BC on a shard of pottery found in what's now turkey to smiley faces on hand signed letters throughout the ages, but really what put the smiley on the map in 1963 was this New York radio station WMCA, which printed a hand drawn smiley face on the school bus yellow sweatshirts and then they passed them out by the thousands and they had influencers of the time,

like Mick Jagger, wearing them. And then a year later, a guy named Harvey R. Ball, who was an art designer for a Massachusetts-based insurance company, refined that image and put it on a similar yellow background, and then the round smiley faces evolution was near complete. Until, of course, emojis just took it

into a completely different dimension. But people still fight about the exact origin in the early 1960s. Even Harvey R. Ball's 2001 archived New York Times of Pituary includes a quote from the radio station manager saying that they did it first, which is like anguish face emoji already. Gregor here's wants to know, very specific, why isn't there a puppet emoji? Well, there you go. Yep, that's always the one. That's every object on earth could be added. I think we're on a slippery slope there of every object and it happens, you know, you add one thing, you add another thing and then people go, well, there's no puppet. And I think that's an okay idea.

I think puppets could be fun. What type would it be, though? Would it be a marionette puppet, or would it be a sort of a hand up the puppet, up the... I'm gonna say butt. The sock sort of thing. I think a sock one would be fun. A sock one would be good.

A sock one would be cute and fun. I think you're right. In Violet, Sarah had a great question, should be on the board. Why are some obvious emojis missing, like a squirrel or a shovel? But other emojis have duplicates, like a paperclip and two paperclips. Yeah, all the worst decisions were mostly inherited. Love that. So there's a weird thing where the first emoji set for in Japan, the second kind of batch that came in, mostly came from windings, the font on windows.

Yes. So for instance, Japan might have had the one paper clip, windings might have had two, and they all got merged into a big set. It's why there's so many boats and trains and things, because they're used for timetables in Japan to message them out. So that's why there's so many useless

or duplicated ones from the early days. As for why there's not things that you actually want and useful things, I think a spader or shovel would be good. I think maybe that might be on lists already. I'm not sure I'd have to check. Have a look at that one. But yeah, there's plenty. You could go through. There are still lots that you could add. It's just where you draw the line. I mean, everyone loves a garden tool, right? I mean like everyone. There is a bucket emoji. There's a bucket emoji. Is it your favorite? If you could not tell from the time of my voice, its inclusion is not my favorite. How did it come to be? Let's just call it an experimental phase where lots of things were added to the keyboard at

my point. Well, one listener asked why there wasn't a shovel emoji and it is frustrating that there's a bucket emoji, but not a shovel. But okay, I will defend shovel or a bucket because it's an action. It's a verb. There could be more verbs in the vernacular of the emoji space. And there's no real like, really old school geocities, gifts of construction,

like the site is under construction. Yes, yes. There's some really good, both modern contemporary associations with a shovel, as well as just like the concept of digging. I mean, we have a hole. There is a hole emoji. Yes, I enjoyed that one a lot.

I had a hole out. Yes, I enjoyed that one. Super Sarah Craig Collins, what's the deal with the creepy floating guy? The jumping scum man levitating suit. What's up with that? Windings. He came from windings. Windings. Okay. A ghost from windings. Yep. Yep. This person, by the way, does not respond to jumping scum man, but rather man in business suit levitatingating emoji and was based off of this glyph from a dingbat font that was based off the logo for two tones records who baseded off of a Jamaican reggae artist Peter Tosh whose birth name was Winston Hubert Macintosh and apparently he was named after Winston Churchill. So he was like, yeah, no, you can just call me Peter. But back to WingDing's DingBat glyphs. Okay, what in the mouthful am I saying?

So WingDing's is a font full of dingbats, and dingbats are ornamental glyphs. Been around forever, even in the printing press. And glyphs are characters or pictograms. Now the guy who designed the Wingding's glyph for jump that has now become the man in business who levitating emoji is one Vincent Connare and he is also the daddy of the font Comic Sans. And apparently Vincent does not give a poop emoji that you hate Comic Sans, because Comic Sans has been on all kinds of book covers, laminated menus, and even the Pope's photo album. And Vincent calls Comic Sans the greatest joke he's ever told. He also created, side note, the font,

Trayboucher, which I love, and I only recently found out was named after a medieval catapult. But yes, who isn't a little horny for these tiny little pictures of history? Oh, speaking of. So many people, Lauren Scaliborealis, hi Scalibore, R.J. Doige, Kitakat 81, Alison Brooks, first time question asker. I wanted to know in Alison's words, who coined the eggplant emoji for not eggplant?

Penis, mean to penis. And is coining an emoji a thing like it is for a phrase? When did the eggplant start meaning? Oh, dick! Yeah, that's a great question and I don't know the answer to that. That happened very early on. I think that was happening pre-emoji-pedia which made it very hard to trace back. It wasn't happening in Japan as far as I could see.

It was an outside Japan thing but it was very early days. People just saw that and went, that is phallic. We are going to use it this way. It's straight up. It's utilitarian. Yes. Okay. And when this Obergine emoji made its grand debut on Japanese keyboards in 2007, it was an instant classic.

It then wiggled its way and took global keyboards a few years later. But it's just very hard to trace the first use of it as a dong. Or the peach as a bud, although a mojipedia has noted that the eggplant emoji is popularly paired with the peach emoji, which is often used to represent buttocks or female genitalia, which on one hand, I'm like, Avolva is not but cheeks. With all these emojis, can't we differentiate the two? But on the other hand, I think it's kind of a nice sweet universal symbol

for bottoming, which you can explain all of this year and on Facebook. But she's probably not shocked. She probably smoked hash watching the moon landing. Nothing matters. Also, this research did lead me to a 2019 linguistics paper called emoji as digital gestures. That learned me that the okay sign emoji does not immediately connote positivity

and in Greece, Turkey, and Southern Italy, it means asshole. So I'm like, ooh, that could be a butthole emoji, but no, it's been co-opted by fascists. And I hate that. So there goes our universal butthole emoji. Ha-rumpf. Oh, on that topic. Michael Swords Slayer and Jen wanted to know about unintended meetings. And Slayer asked, what do they do

when certain emojis cough, purple vegetables, cough develop meanings behind their intended? Michael Swords wrote that the gay community has started to use the eggplant and peach to identify their sexual roles. Drug communities have used ice cream to suggest that they're looking for meth. Did you know that? I don't know about ice cream. Ice cream one before. I didn't know that. But when it comes to Unicode talking about the

eggplant, how often does the eggplant and the peach come up for butts and dicks, like, how often is that talked about? Because we all know that that's what the, like I've bought my husband a pair of Crocs and I got him Croc charms that are like a we're peach and egg plant, of course. But what, how acknowledged is that behind the scenes? Well, you know, I mean, this is a thing about people taking an image and giving it meaning. You know, peaches haven't always meant butts, right? Right?

You're right. Because it was drawn in such a specific way that you were just like, that's a butt. Also, it is from a place of need, right? You want, people are sexting, people are saying nasty, you know, like, you know, they saying, the things that they're saying? And there's no but emoji. I mean, you could do the ASCII but, Perrin underscore, asterix underscore, Perrin, which is verbose for texting. Who wants to follow the symbols? So you take something and you give it new meaning. And that is language.

I mean, that is just mine's interacting with each other. And I think that's amazing. Same for eggplant. There was, they're like, I need something really long. Yeah, not the cucumber, depending on the contact. Well, exactly. You can use the cucumber now. Like, certainly trying to mitigate risk is something that any designer is working in tech holds themselves accountable to, but I don't think like sex and drugs is a reason. Like we're not going to abolish the letters W, E, D, because of weed. Yeah, yeah. No, like you can't suppress people in that way.

And so from a Unicode perspective, we are looking at multiple uses. We are anticipating using sequences. We're looking at how it's used conventionally throughout history, but just because it wasn't used a thousand years ago that way, doesn't mean it won't be used in the future. I don't know, I think I love that, obviously. Yeah. Earl of Gramlican, who came up with the emojis of cat faces

having emotional reactions to things? And how do I think them for creating the most valuable emojis? Why do cats get expressions but dogs don't? Not dogs, no dogs, yep. Or raccoons or possums. The original Japanese creators just liked the cat ones. They had faces and no one wanted to open the door to have every face as every raccoon or dog.

That makes sense? Jenny Lithfall, what's the black box about? Black box was just there as an early character as a symbol, a placeholder, and then now there's colored boxes as well, so you can make your own like ask-y-art, but with colors. Well, what about the ones that look like a mochi ball or rice ball, then they have a black box in them?

Have you seen these? Okay, so if you go to your emoji keyboard, hit the food section that looks like a burger, and then scroll a few rows in, and next to the Gioza and raw oyster. There's a white triangle and a brown circle, and both have black boxes on them, but when you type them as a singular message,

you know, they get bigger, and it's finally clear that. Those are snacks, those are little Japanese treats. That's some seaweed. The black thing at the bottom there is the little seaweed wrap up like you have around you, Suci. Well, there we go. Buddy, freaking Gaierson for some cross-nascar. Kitty, Holtman, Michael Wegman, Tay Samms

for some cross-nascar. Becky, the Sassy Seagrass scientist, and Ariel, Chalpeleg, wanted to know, what's the future? Buddy wanted to know, at what point will our history be represented? Solly and represented solely in poop emojis and eggplants. Where do you see it going? Emergies as we have them today. I think they're stabilizing in a good way. I think we're kind of done. I feel like we're kind of tie a bow around it. Out of few more useful ones. Go that's the set. Cat faces only. no dog faces, smiley poo, just go finish it off. Yeah, finish it off. To all to say, pink heart was one of the last ones that I felt like really needed

to get over the line. And yeah, you just go great. We've got 3,500, 3,600 and so on. Mojis, call today, that is text. We're moving into a video virtual reality augmented reality world. So let's see what happens over there. Well, evolution is inevitable. Yes. So and that's part of the magic of emojis too, is that they don't always mean what they meant six months ago. Yes.

And that's what keeps them exciting. It could be a new meaning for one for centuries to come. emojis are permanent. Once they're approved, they stick around forever. So there's three thousand also to change the meaning of whatever you like. And Kate Marie had a quick question. Could an emoji be part of someone's legal name? Does that happen? Ooh, I do not believe that is the case. I mean, it will be really very depending on jurisdiction, of course. But I do not believe that an emoji could be used as an element of someone's legal

name. That's not to say that those rules couldn't change in one jurisdiction, but that's by in large fine what you're trying to enter your name, maybe into a digital text input field. But if you have to sign a document, dear Lord, you have to get very, very artistic every time you want to sign a receipt, for example. Pauline Gaines-Bloom asked, will we ever see emojis become commonplace in literature, and at what point is it just part of our language? And you know, emojipedia is just part of the OED.

Actually, in 2015, the word of the year was the laugh crying emoji. So will emojis be commonplace in literature? I personally don't see emojis becoming commonplace in literature. I think they're going to become more common as a kind of playful reflection of the contemporary world. Definitely, I have no idea what the number is, but I'd say there's been thousands of books published in the last say five years that when they're representing text messages, they're going to contain an emoji within the text. Beyond that, I only really envision them entering into the prose space as a kind of creative

project. And this, of course, will never really be the norm for the majority of written pieces of literature. There is a couple of books out there that I do know of that I've played with this concept. One of the go-tos is the quote-unquote emoji translation of Moby Dick, called emoji Dick, which again was a creative project. It was an exercise in crowdsourcing, quote-unquote translations to represent a variety of different, and let's say somewhat complex sentences in the English language. So I don't see them entering this literature space in a kind of a serious commonplace manner.

How should people celebrate World of Mojito on the 17th? Yeah, find an emoji, make a new sex meaning for an existing emoji. I think it's, I think we haven't had a new sex emoji for a long time now. I think find an obscure one and find a way to make it somehow a bit dirtier than it's meant to be and make that a thing. I think that should be your job this year. And you started in the private chat. Don't launch it in Slack. Oh no, soft launch in the private chat. Yeah, stop there. Possibly it should never make it's way to the workplace. So you know you've had a success when you use it when I come people go, I don't think you should be using that one.

Yeah. I've had it's got another meaning. That's a great, that's such a good point. It's a very, very exciting world emoji day. So we've been hosting world emoji day for 10 years now. This will be its 10th annual celebration on, of course, July 17th, the date that is shown on the majority of the calendar emoji designs. It's also going to be the 10th anniversary of the

founding of a Mojipedia. I think the earliest set we have on the site is 1997 from one of the Japanese vendors. So yeah, there's a lot to celebrate after 10 years in this emoji biz. And the thing closest to Jennifer's various different colored hearts. I love emoji kitchen. I love it so very much. So one of the things that sucks about working with conventional unicode emoji is that you can't experiment. Like I said, you can't remove an emoji later. So with emoji kitchen, it's this way to experiment and be playful and do things you can't do with standard emoji so you can type in Octopus and coffee

And it runs and creates an octopus holding much of coffees Because I love the octopus because it has this gesture and it's like how was work today? It was octopus. Yeah I can be like how was work today. It was octopus that I had lots of caffeine and I was, what it was. Now you need a weighted blanket. No, I need a different type of drink. And there's lots of different ways you can combine it, which I really, it's all grounded

and what I've learned from Unicode around how you can combine to emoji next to each other, like cartwheeling person next to a hole for a nervous breakdown. Or like poop and tornado. You know, like a shit storm. And for emoji kitchen, there's like a number of different ways you can combine things. So you can combine the colored hearts with an emoji and it changes its color. So if you wanted like a goth hard eyes,

you know, black heart eyes instead of red ones, you could do black heart, hard eyes, and that creates like goth hard eyes. Or if you want your pineapple to be like a really nerdy pineapple, you're gonna go face glasses plus pineapple and it puts glasses on the pineapple. Ah, it's like Port Manto jeez. Well, it also is kind of, I'm trying to do with it is say like you don't have to just add how we look. This is a feeling like I don't know what I want to have for dinner. Burger Shrug. Burger Shrug.

That's a feeling. I don't want to have to be forced to pick how I look when really what I want to convey is how I feel. And I can't change Unicode on that level, right? I can't say, okay, we're gonna start over from scratch, right? But what I can do with emoji kitchen is be somewhat provocative about how we convey and project ourselves and want to be perceived.

And so you can use it on Android devices primarily. And it just combines when you put two emoji next to each other. Is there anything for, if you're an Apple or a different type of phone users or like a website that you can go and grab that emoji at all? Only illegal ones. OK, good to know.

Good to know. I think that seems like an amazing part of a job. But what is your favorite thing about the job, about being a curiologist? Oh, I just love, I really love talking to people about how they use emoji. It really is the best part, because it doesn't matter how old you are, where you are,

everyone has used them, everyone has an opinion on them, even if it's self-deprecating. Oh, so boring, I just use the same emoji. Like, oh, there's so many stories like flashed on my head. But everyone has stories like even after there are conversations, I'm going to be thinking about your black heart anecdote. It's it's such a fascinating space to be working in. I genuinely consider it my greatest

professional pleasure to have kind of meandered away from psychology and ended up in this incredibly versatile field that straddles so many academic disciplines, but also it's a great personal pleasure to be researching how they're evolving over time. Provided that we are continuing to communicate in text-based formats, emojis are here to stay, It's gone beyond the keyboard, and they're now some of the most recognizable symbols in human history. I mean, they alleviate the need to exclamation mark.

They do make it easier to communicate. It's fun. You can be playful. You can quickly send your heart, send your thumbs up. It's so much easier to get what you want across. And yeah, I think it's interesting and fascinating. I've always liked the whole shared experience thing. And I love the fact it's just such a weird set of characters with all these questions

and that it doesn't really make sense when you look at it as a whole. But I just like the fact that the human race we came together, we invented this in Japan, we standardized it, we made committees and boardrooms, because that's what we do. We put it on billions of devices and now we're just kind of stuck with it. We standardized that we made committees and boardrooms because that's what we do. We put it on billions of devices and now we're just kind of stuck with it.

And I think that's fun. I love it. Thank you so much for doing this. If I could react with a clapping, applause, emoji, reaction to this exchange, I definitely would. I'd send you a party blowing face. I do love a party horn. Yeah, that is fun.

So ask several very smart people, colorful questions, and do a party-blowing face. I do love a party horn. Yeah, that is fun. So ask several very smart people, colorful questions, because there's a whole little tiny world of little details and big meanings to discover. And isn't that just life? So thanks for coming along on this Curiological Journey. It's really such a big deal for me

to cover it on this podcast, because it's the reason this podcast exists. And thank you to Jennifer, Jeremy, and Keith for their expertise. You can find links to them and their work in the show notes and a link to our website where we list so many other links and resources and studies. We are at Oligies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm at Allie Warrant on both. Allie with just one L.

Thank you to Aaron Talbert for admitting the Oligies podcast Facebook group. This is from Bonnie Dutch and Shannon Feltis. Merch is available at Oligiesmerch.com. We've got hats and toads and visors and all kinds of things. Thank you to Susan Hale for handling that as well as making sure everyone gets paid. She does everything. Noelle Dillworth does our scheduling and some social and is the best. Emily White of the Wordery makes professional transcripts and you can find those linked in the show notes. Smalleges are also available. They're shorter kid-friendly versions of classic episodes. Those are linked at alliwar.com slash smalleges and thank you to Gerrit Sleeper and Zeeb Rodriguez-Tomas of Mind Jam Media for editing those alongside the wonderful Mercedes-Mateland. Kelly R. Dwyer works

on the website. Nick Thorburn made the theme music and lead editors and producers the past few episodes are of course the one employee I'd send an eggplant emoji to because we are legally married, Jert Sleeper of Mind Gem Media, and the platonically loved Mercedes-Mateland of Madeland audio. If you stick around until the end of the episode, you know, I tell you a secret. And I've been kind of crawling my way

through the last few weeks just because of some speaking engagements and travel and also the anniversary of my dad's death, which was not easy. But this Allegy's team is just the best and I couldn't do any of this without them. So that is one not secret. It's just get great help when you need it and tell them how amazing they are.

And y'all are so great. The other secret is that sometimes I glue tiny magnets onto rocks so that I can arrange the rocks in different orders and color orders on a magnetic whiteboard in my office because it's like the lowest stakes puzzle ever. And it's just rocks. And honestly, I think my perfect day would probably involve some kind of ice blended and

a botanical garden or a hike, sketching leaves and critters and maybe crafting some rock magnets. But people, the last few times I treated myself to gluing magnets on rocks, my computer didn't recognize my biometrics for days because I don't know how not to superglue my fingers together. But anyway, I hope you sit somewhere and picture your perfect day.

And then just go do as many of those things as you can. Just don't fuck up your fingers fingers because that's a real pain. Oh, also, did you know that there's an empty jar emoji? I just discovered it like 10 minutes ago. I was like, what is this? What the fuck? There's also one with a piece of cheese under a box, like a booby trap. Oh, and there's a year of a mantecord?

So many. Okay, go stare at him, bye bye. Hackadermy, college,ege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pall, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pallege, Pall, Pege, Pall, Pege, Pall, Pall, Pallege, P Instead of giving someone a real smile, we send an emoji.