Will we get an emoji poop?

WE HAVE a smiling pile of poop. What about one that’s sad?

There’s loaf of bread and a croissant. But where’s the sliced bagel?

How can our emotional vocabulary be complete without a teddy bear, a lobster, a petri dish or a tooth?

These are the kind of questions that trigger heated debates and verbal bomb-tossing or at least memos with bursts of capital letters among members of the group burdened with deciding which new emojis make it on to our phones and computer screens each year.

And now more people are getting in on the act.

The Unicode Consortium is tasked with setting the global standard for the icons. It’s a heady responsibility and it can take years from inspiration – hey, why isn’t there a dumpling? – to a new symbol being added to our phones.

That’s because deciding whether a googly-eyed turd should express a wider range of emotions is not the frivolous undertaking it might appear to be. Picking the newest additions to our roster of cartoonish glyphs, from deciding on their appearance to negotiating rules that allow vampires but bar Robert Pattinson’s or Dracula’s likeness, actually has consequences for modern communication.

Not since the printing press has something changed written language as much as emojis have, says Lauren Collister, a scholarly communications librarian at the University of Pittsburgh. “Emoji is one way language is growing,” she says. “When it stops growing and adapting, that’s when a language dies.”

Growing and adapting doesn’t seem like an issue for emojis. The latest additions include gender-neutral characters, a breastfeeding woman and a woman in a hijab. – AP