New emojis on the way, but there’s a process
The ever-expanding cyber vocabulary could get the new symbol added to its ranks, but there’s a process for it
NEW YORK — 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 gender-neutral 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.
What makes the cut
Back in August 2015, journalist and author Jennifer 8. Lee was texting with her friend Yiying Lu, the graphic designer behind the iconic “fail whale” illustration that used to pop up when Twitter’s network was down.
But when they proposed the frowning poop, they met with some resistance.
“Will we have to encode a neutral FACELESS PILE OF POO? As an ordinary user, I don’t want this kind of crap on my phone,” wrote Michael Everson, a linguist, typographer, in a memo to the Unicode Technical Committee.
Another member, typographer Andrew West, wasn’t happy with a proposal for a sliced bagel emoji.
“Why are we prioritizing bagel over other bread products?” he wrote. Clearly he is not a New Yorker.
Got an idea for an emoji and are willing to fight for it? It’s not too late to submit one for the class of 2019. As for 2018, stay tuned. We’ll know in a few months which ones made the cut. And while there’s a desire to be funny and quirky, the diversity of emojis is a real issue.
Amy Butcher, whose 2015 essay prompted Google to propose emojis to represent women as professionals— and not just brides and polished nails — thinks there’s more work to do. The Ohio Wesleyan University professor would like to see interracial couples and human in a wheelchair to represent a disabled person.
“These tiny, insignificant images begin to create an everyday narrative, and it’s deeply problematic that one might consistently find their identity or demographic lacking, or pigeonholed, or altogether absent,” she said.