Will we get a sad poop emoji? Well, there’s a unique process to it
Growing and adapting doesn’t seem like an issue for emojis. The additions for 2017 included gender- neutral characters, a breastfeeding woman and a woman in a hijab.
New York, Dec. 31: 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 onto 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 additions for 2017 included genderneutral characters, a breastfeeding woman and a woman in a hijab.
For better or worse, the expanding vocabulary has given us an emoji movie, emoji short story contests and books written in emoji — someone translated “Moby Dick” into “Emoji Dick.” In 2015, Oxford Dictionaries declared the “face with tears of joy” emoji its word of the year. New York’s Museum of Modern art has added the original emoji set to its permanent collection. Apple’s pricey iPhone X lets you send animojis, animated emojis that mimic your facial expressions and speak in your voice.
These tiny pictographs became a part of our online language with the ascent of cellphones, getting their start in Japan in 1999 — “emoji” combines the Japanese words for “picture,” or “e? ( pronounced “eh”), and “letters,” or “moji” ( moh- jee). At first, there were just 176: simplistic, highly pixelated icons such as a heart, a soccer ball and a rocking horse. Today there are more than a thousand. Because none are taken away, their number only keeps growing.
“Long after you and I are dust in the wind there will be a red wine emoji,” said Mark Davis, the co- founder and president of Unicode Consortium who also works at Google.
Anyone can propose an emoji. But for it to make it to phones and computers, it has to be approved by Unicode.