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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, Alie Ward, why the same intro because we're back part two of Curiology, 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 dot com slash ologies, but
you can join for one shiny dollar a month. You can also support the show just by telling a friend 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 is very scurred of thunder and fireworks, but somehow they write, quote, I put on a podcast only ologies works, and their dog slowly nods off in the blissful sleep of animal dreams and length twitches while Ali teaches him things he
will immediately forget. Lena the Queen, thank you for the review. It's an honor to be in his ears and also yours and everyone's Okay, Curiology 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, the ghosts, the bucket, and so much more, with a perfect gaggle of Emojipedia editors, past and present, Unicode members, scholars, designers, enthusiasts, and curiologists. Because yes, there are three guests again, Jennifer Daniel,
Keith Broney and Jeremy Burge. Can I ask you some questions from listeners?
Yes? Love a listener question?
Okay, good, Adam still wants to know as well as Amanda Smith, Super Sarah Jenlo Rhodes, first time question asker Lena Quinn and Steeping Films wanted to know, in Adam's words, what was the first emoji? Steeping Films aka Erica who will wants to know our cave paintings, consider the og emojis. When do emoji start?
So Emojipedia started twenty and thirteen, so we only had two and thirteen onwards. Okay, After a few years, it became my mission to go back to Japan, and I was a good excuse to have some nice sushi, a bit of a travel around, but also to track down people who were there, because these people are alive today, right the 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 nineteen ninety seven, which was a love heart 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.
Do you have a horror 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 I was joking about only using the cards 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. He a message of mojiped to be like John May is over here saying this is the only alpha Hart 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 Emojipedia. No corporate like 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 associations.
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, how do you 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 no longer people that I was goth 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 cart for sure. More on the chromatics of curiology 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 hot exclamation. Mack, No, is that what That's what that's meant? No 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 the hot exclamation mark at the end.
I've been using the pink heart with sparkles. 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, heart exploding oh next to each other.
Okay, so there are well over twenty different heart emoji options growing all the time. There's so many ways to say I like you, 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 cross linguistic color theory, and I mean this is what makes the emoji work continually interesting. Okay, So if you look at literature in cross linguistic study, it suggests that there's a maximum of eleven basic color terms, okay, 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 then third phase is either green or yellow, and the fourth phase is both green and yellow. The next phase is blue than 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 nineteen sixty nine, 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 probably say in 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 you're browns. And then the last major color words to be added linguistically are usually purples and pinks and oranges and gray. Now English has eleven, which Berlin and k noted, where 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 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.
So when you're looking at these eleven 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 I perceive? You have to kind of have a constraint there. And so these eleven basic color terms are a way of creating a closed set of colors and 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 going to take it the wrong way, right, I don't know.
I feel like gray heart is like devoid of color and all love. Like oh, and they're like, oh gray heart, like you've been drained of everything?
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 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 emojing about the Raiders, they're like, yes, because you're not going.
To 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 Fox or something kind of goth. I'm thinking like black and white films. M hm, you know, like the gray heart would work.
How do you feel about the update with at least I messaging where you can respond via holding down the message and then you can do an exclamation, 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 the very minimum. Someone tells you good news, thumbs up, blah awful, hot, nice, but still a bit like a bit like you're not excited for me, like that's lovely deal.
Yeah yeah, And the exclamation point sometimes can come off as incredulous, like.
Yeah you won that rude and you're.
Like, no, no, no, I'm just saying like that's amazing.
You know, had someone before and nowgo what do you make I'll send the X mark is excited and have a friend go you 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 haha, 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 a whole set. That was something announced last week, So later in the year there'll be more options done a bit differently, but the same sort of idea.
Oh that's so good to know, okay, because I need that. Some people. Lee, Katy Murray, and Abbie and Scarlet 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 twenty fifteen study by the latted Rutgers University anthropologist are Helen Fisher, and it involved analyzing data from over five thousand singles in America via match dot com and the TLDR is that, yes, people who used emojis did the business more than non emogitarians. Fifty four percent of emoji users had sex in the year prior. Well, only thirty one percent 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 doctor 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 twenty nineteen there was a follow up study titled Worth one Thousand Interpersonal Words emoji as effective signals for a relationship ship oriented digital communication. So they analyzed more survey data and found yes, indeed, past 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 twenty
twenty one entitled tuned In on Sender'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 it 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 an express emotion. You know, do you ever hear that different people gravitate toward emojis differently?
We definitely had a lot of neurodive division people appreciating emojipedia because they lack the fact that said, here's 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, men or women, And it's very hard to get good data on this sort of thing, especially as so much of its 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 that's my opinion, having seen the types of users we get attends to people who care about being clear in their emotions. They want to have it and they're not afraid in some tech older men. I think it's not as much of a thing now, but we used to get some angry, older sort of tech commentators who think one of them blocked us on the endicta just for I don't know, just sort of calling it a thing for only for kids that just get personally upset by it. And that was only ever saw men get
upset by that. I never saw women going dah emojis.
Yeah, okay, So let's take the twenty eighteen 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 thisender gender eighty one percent of
the time. How how did they 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 genders? Are just
our personalities, all right? There was a twenty eighteen publication mining the relationship between emoji usage patterns and personality, and it looked at get this one point one three 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 contexts over iplicit 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 abojis, which is just brutally accurate. Anyone who has received a text for me has probably gotten the anguished face, one like the wailing, open mouthed, crying one. You know you've gotten that for me, I'm on a deadline anguish face. Are we at a Lacroix 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 okay. Scarlet Pondra and Keaton Sant both had questions along that line. Keaton one shadow, when will it finally be considered professional to use emojis and email else? 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 shrug emoji?
I think people wait for the first person. No one wants to be the first one to send it, and once the floodgates are open, 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 law 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 where you don't have a choice. But I say go for it, and if they don't like it, they'll duget over it.
You obviously get a pass you should be using if you send an email without an emoji. It seems like that would be an issue. But have you seen like 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 like so many different examples that 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, uh huh really, I don't even know, like all caps. And this is again another form of policing language and telling people like okay, 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 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.
Ah, that's such a good point.
Time I meet someone, it is they always give me an example, either something they hate about emoji or something I 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 very decorative, and so because they provide some sort of utility, it's hard to argue not using them because they are helpful. It's a whole other space about emoji 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, like you're smiling. I know that we're connecting on some level. If this wasn't here, I'd be left to my imagination. Oh it's very hard on me. Yeah, that I am.
Not communicating and that you don't get it. And you know, unless I heard laughter, that would be helpful. But you know, emoji and digital spaces are this way back channeling in the same way as gesture does when someone takes notes. When you're talking, you're like, oh, I said something interesting. Yeah, right, Like we've evolved to laugh for a reason. Yeah, connect
with people and to 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 no emoji in there, I feel constipated.
You're like, what's happening here?
I think the most person I like what they're saying, I have no way of doing it. Yeah, it makes a big difference.
Ultimately, this is something that researchers in the linguistic space have been trying to say about, not exclusively Emoji's beIN 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's a whole different kind
of tonal register involved. For example, in prose, of course, we're always clarifying the manner 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 parentheses or an emoji.
They'll use a variety of different paralinguistic tools to try and create a sense of emotional context within these, you know, 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 context is attempting to bring some of the nonverbal information that we have at our disposal.
When we're speaking face to face or indeed a visual medium, or 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. Emojis are our attempt, or rather they're being used as our attempt to try and bridge that gap or like fill that
gap in communication. And 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 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, etc.
Oh.
I'm going to 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 sad way. I am married. It's disappointing. I haven't got to use the dating apps you have it.
How long have you been with your partner.
I've been with my partner since before dating apps. So've been together since I was twenty one or so. And this is now. Yeah, I guess so.
Yeah, so you were a relationship predated. Oh no, I use 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 for more sixteen year olds being like what does this mean? Yeah, 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 if your crush sends you this? 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 Truperman wanted to know how often do the current emojis get updated, and Stephanie says, just curio curiologist for you. Is it random or do they do like a 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? Ye, 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, the social push when you get that first message where you don't know what the emotion is and it's so ambiguous that especially if you get a message that could go either way depending the emoji. So yes, 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.
Do you know what is coming up next? Do you hear murmurings 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
Hot coming out the next day is list. I think it's in draft already, and I think I glanced at it once, but I'm being too retired to pay attention. If you look it up, it's called EMOGI fifteen dot one. You can google it. You find a page on unicode or emgipedire and it will say the draft list being considered.
Hell, yes, I look this up and fifteen point one 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 going to drop. They got a lime, there's a broken chain link coming, and also a mushroom, but a brown one, not the Amanitas red speckled mushroom kind.
So these are due to come out September twenty twenty three. 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 cologists, 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 are redhead's gonna get their due?
So that's so funny. Okay, So, oh.
Ellie, I'm not a natural redhead. I'm absolutely an impostor. This is not genic 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 if you look in the people section, you got a Baldi, you got someone with curly hair, you got a red head. I think you even got to like a silver fox in there as well. They are more portraits, got it. You can't make a red headed doctor, you make a red
headed face palm. And so this is where the delineation 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 umlots 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 your the gap in your teeth or your color glasses or your color hair. And so I subscribe to less realism than more. And so rather than adding more more physical attributes to our keyboard, because you can never attain actual inclusion if you pursue that root. Because how many people are in
the world. That's how much customization would need to be in the 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. And the issue is those numbers, right that you multiply out if every person right, so you have hundreds of humans already with different skin tones, and right now there's skin links to the hair. You get a white person, they get dark hair, you get the next skin tone out, 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 had red and curly, hundreds more. Again, and even though it seems like no big deal because all the modern platforms got filters and stuff, the way emojis are done is a font. They're kind of like this old school tech where it's loaded in memory the whole time, and there are 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 literally one hundreds thousands even, and that's not what the platforms want.
How many emojis are there now?
It's over three thousand. I'm going to say, yeah, over three thousand, over three thousand, five hundred even, I'm going to say three thousand, six hundred and something.
It's right around there. Correct, What are the first Apple upgrade? Like I remember updating my software.
You'd have 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 eighteen characters because you have a little weightlifter person that's very nice, but they're yellow. And then you push in 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 three thy five hundred and something does sound like a lot.
We get a lot of flavors within that. You do, yeah, and who is pushing for that kind of progress? Because 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 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 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 complain to Apple in particular, even though they're not 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 five six seven 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 to the humans, goodbye little humans, take
the humans out. Ah, So, there's no way we're too 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. Like I'm not saying have only white men are 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 you know that's hindsight flags or 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 emoji that. Oh 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 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 man's plain with you know, a person face palmbing, and I could see her phone and it rendered as a man instead of woman. I know exactly. I was just like, what your phone? And so she had an iPhone 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 palming, a code point for a woman face palming, and then a third code point for face palming gender not specified. And what some designers did was they're like, what does that mean? Oh, I don't know, I just making a man. No, And then for others, I don't know, I was just making a woman. So this existed for a long time.
Oh my god, I did.
It was like a did a big audit. I said, Okay, where are the difference is I'm sending you a Morman, you're seeing a person, or I'm sending you a more person and 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 the It's already existed, So Paul Hunt 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 and we added a lot of new characters for it. But it didn't stop there. Right when you start looking at skin tone, I would you know, like all the hands have skin tone except for handshake. Oh, to deal with that, right, So now our handshake has not just a universal tone applied to it, but you
can change the left hand on the right hand. We also have a number of different couples, 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 going to add a bunch of those different ways. But the world has changed a lot since those were added. Just I don't need less than ten years ago, maybe just slightly like around ten years ago. I now like 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? It doesn't even have to include children. It can just be two people. It could be your grandparents. It could be two people and a dog. It could be one person and three cats.
Cats, cats, and more cats.
Your family should not be prescribed by your keyboard. And while it is an important 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 category as a whole. At the very
bottom is families and wrestlers. Wrestlers also amongst the least popularly used emoji, So you know, there's a number of different things. You know, you then ask 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?
What is it like?
Is it because it's it's such a literal representation of family. If it can't capture your family literally, it falls short. One answer to this would be, okay, let's just add all the skin tones to these characters, which would result in over seven thousand new emoji.
Ah yeah, because it's so specific.
Yes, it just and our keyboard's already bloated with slightly over three thousand right now, and to add that many for an 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 at all of the code points, which I proposed. It was like a ten page paper and I 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 plot designers will be designing these family emoji for the next three years. If we add this many, you know, like, and people don't even use them, we can't do it. I was like, well, it's not acceptable to have these emoji and 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 a 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 that they're bigger, and then to smaller looking people could say their children. So we're making them into symbols. Nice. 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 gees. Facebook added those react g's in early twenty sixteen, after Slack did it a year earlier, and now all kinds of sites from Twitter to LinkedIn offer a menu of react geese for the times when typing out, Hey, that pisses me off or shipballs man that sucks. I'm sorry, just takes too much of our time. So as World Emoji Day approaches July seventeenth, 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 the ologists choosing, and this week it's going to the nonprofit 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 seventeenth, 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 of oologies.
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Okay, back to your questions, including as promised gossip that we can pry out of these experts.
I don't think the committees to 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 concern that sometimes people refer to some people as cockroaches in a oh poor way. That you can't police how people use something, but you still have to weigh it up. Is this more useful
to lighter than not? There would definitely be ones that come along where you kind of think, this is definitely intended in a good way, but can it be used in a bad way?
Yeah?
It can it 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 are 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 an ambiguous person in a wedding dress. Some people would tell me why people will make fun of the transdand
of community people might it's a valid concern. I haven't actually seen it be used like that, thankfully, but it could have been, and you have to weigh it off.
I wouldn't it's so funny because it's so in the eye of the boulder. I'm like, 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 for I wanted to know who decided to make
the universal character yellow like kind of Simpson's 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 sixties. It's also not yellow. It's supposed to be gold, but you know, you could look at the Japanese phone carrier. Those emoji actually weren't gold at all. They were like magenta.
So because it was no you know those old Nokia phones. Yeah, 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, you know, 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. Doctor Alexander Robertson of the University
of Edinburgh's School of Informatics can So. This doc's PhD dissertation from twenty twenty two is titled Expression and Perception of Identity through skin Toned Emoji, and in addition to outlining the history of emoji invented by Shiki Taka Krita in the late nineteen nineties, it also includes very recent research about TME or tone modifiable emoji and doctor Robertson draws on research from their previously co 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 doctor 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 eyedey. However, it is also possible, they write 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 socio cultural context, white is the historically dominant in default category, they write, and yes, we will link doctor Alexander Roberts'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 nineteen sixties ish smiley face. Any reason why it was yellow or why we continue 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 like human history? Is that from the sixties.
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 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 a as far as I can see, there is a long history going back more than one hundred years of smiley faces that people can find prior an't in print, I think up to
two hundred years ago. It's just one of those things right in parallel. If you show 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 seventeen hundred 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 mat app in nineteen sixty three 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 face's evolution was near complete, until, of course, emoji's just took it into a completely different dimension, but people still fight about the exact origin in the early nineteen sixties, even Harvey R. Ball's two thousand and one archived New York Times obituary includes a quote from
the radio station manager saying that they did it first, which it's like anguish face emoji already. Gregory Hayes wants to know, very specific, why isn't there a puppet emoji?
Well, there you go, Yeah, that's always the one. That's 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 thin it'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 there, I'm gonna say,
but the sock sort of thing. I think a sock one would be fun. A sock one would be good, be cute and fun.
I think you're right, And 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 paper clip and two paper clips.
Yeah, all the worst decisions were mostly inherited. So there's a weird thing where there is the first emoji set from Japan. The second kind of batch that came in mostly came from Windings, the A 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. That's why there's so many boats and trains and things, because we 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 to why there's not things that you actually want and useful things. I think a spader a shovel would be good. I think maybe that might be on a list already. I'm not sure. I'd have to check. I have a look at that one. But yeah, there's plenty you go through. There are still lots that you could add. It's just where you draw it alone.
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 cannot tell from the timeline 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 one point, well, one listener asked why there wasn't a shovel emoji. And it is for us that there's a bucket emoji, but not a show shovel.
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 but modern contemporary associations with a shovel as well as just like the concept of digging. I mean we have a whole. There is a whole emoji.
Yes, I enjoy that. When lot hold on Super Sarah Craig Collins, what's to deal with the creepy floating guy, the jumping SKA man levitating suit, what's.
Up with that winding from Windings? Okay, a ghost from Windings yep, yep.
This person, by the way, does not respond to jumping skamand but rather man in business suit levitating emoji and was based off of this glyph from a dingbat font that was based off the logo for two Tones Records, who based it 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 wing
Dings dingbat glyphs. Okay, what in the mouthful am I saying?
So?
Wing Dings is a font full of ding bats, 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 wing Dings glyph for Jump that has now become the man in business suit levitating emoji is one Vincent Kanari 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 trey Bouchet, 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 Scala r J Deutsche Kitty Cat eighty one Allison Brooks First, no question asker wanted to know, in Allison's words, who coined the eggplant emoji for not.
Eggplant, penis meaned penis.
And is coining an emoji a thing like it is for a phrase? When did the eggplant start meeting?
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 Emojipedia, which made it very hard to trace back. Wasn't happening in Japan as far as I could see. It was an outside Japan thing, But it was very early days, like people just sold that and went that is phallic, We're going to use it this way.
It's a strip, it's utilitarian, yes, okay, And when this aubergine emoji made its grand debut on Japanese keyboards in
two thousand and seven, it was an instant classic. It then wiggled its way into 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 butt, although Emojipedia 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 butt 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 to your aunt 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 twenty nineteen linguistics paper called Emoji as Digital Gestures that learned me that the okay sign does not immediately connote positivity, and in Greece, Turkey, and Southern Italy it means asshole, So I'm like oh, 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. Huh rumf 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 developed 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 didn't know about ice cream?
Ice cream one.
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 I've bought my husband a pair of crocs and I got him crock charm that are like a peach and eggplant, of course, but 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, yeah 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're you want if people are sexting, people are saying nasty, you know that you know they're saying the things that they're saying, and there's
no butt emoji. I mean you could do the ASKI butt perenne underscore asterix underscore paren which is verbose for texting. Who wants to find all that symbols? So you take something and you give it new meaning, and that is language. I mean, that is just mind's interacting with each other. And I think that's amazing. Saying for eggplant there, uh I need something really long?
Yeah, not the cucover depending on the context.
Oh exactly, you can't use the cucumber.
Now.
Like, certainly, trying to mitigate risk is something that any designer who's 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 ED 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 use in 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 honestly, you know.
Yeah, Earl of Gramblekin who came up with the emojis of catfaces having emotional reactions to things? And how do I thank them for creating the most valuable emojis? Why do cats get expressions?
But dogs?
Yeah?
Dogs yeah?
To raccoons or possums.
The original Japanese creators just like 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, yep, Jenny Lithfall, what's the black box about?
Black box was just there as an early character as a symbol a place solder, And then now there's colored boxes as well, as you can make your own, like askiot.
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.
There's are snacks. Those are little Japanese treats. That's some seaweed. The black thing at the bottom there is the little seaweed wrapper like you have aroundy sushi.
Well, there we go. Buddy Freakin Gyrison for some question, Oskar Katie Holtman, Michael Wegman, Tay Samps for some question, Osker Becky, the Sasey seagrast scientist, and Ariel Chile Pellegg wanted to know what's the future. Buddy wanted to know, at what point will our history be represented solely in poop emojis and eggplants? Where do you see it going?
Emojis as we have them today, I think that they're stabilizing in a good way. I think we're kind of done. I feel like we're kind of tie bowl around it add a few more useful ones. Go, that's the set cat faces only, no dog faces smiley pooh, yeah, I'll finish it off till the say pink Catt 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 three five hundred, three thousand, six hundred, so
emojis call it a day. 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. Yeah 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 meaningful one for centuries to come. Emojis a 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 Murray 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 really vary 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 you know, that's by and large fine when you're trying to enter your name maybe into a kind of 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, twenty fifteen, 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 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 this concept. One of the go tos is the quote unquote emoji translation of Mobi Dick called Emoji Dick, which again was a creative project.
It was an exercise in crowd sourcing 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 Emoji Day on the seventeenth.
Yeah, find an emoji, make a new sex meaning for an existing emoji. 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 a 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, let's start there. Possibly it should never make its way to the workplace, so you know you've had a success when you use it at work and people go, I don't think you should be using that one. Yes, I've had It's got another meaning.
It's a great such a good point.
It's a very very exciting World Emoji Day. So we've been hosting World Emoji Day for ten years now. This will be its tenth annual celebration on of course July seventeenth, the date that is shown on the majority of the calendar emoji designs. It's also going to be the tenth anniversary of the founding of Emojipedia. I think the earliest set we have on the site is nineteen ninety seven from one of the Japanese vendors. So yeah, there's a lot to celebrate after ten 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 moji. So you can type in octopus and coffee and wine, and it creates an octopus holding a bunch of coffees. Because I love the octopus because it has this gesture and it's like,
how is work today? It was octopus?
Yeah, I can be like I was work today.
It was octopus that I had lots of caffeine and uh what it was?
Now you need a weighted blanket.
Now I be a different type of drink. And there's lots of different ways you can combine it, which I really and 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, right, or like Coop and Tornado, you know, like a shit storm. 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 heart eyes, so you know, black heart eyes instead of red ones. So you could do black heart heart eyes.
And it creates like goth heart 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.
It's like portmanteau. Geez.
Well.
It also is kind of what 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 the 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 are like a website that you can go and grab that emoji at.
All, only illegal ones.
Ah, okay, good to note, Good to note. I think that seems like an amazing part of your job. But what is your favorite thing about the job but 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, there's so many stories that could flashed on.
My head, but everyone has stories. Like even after our conversation, 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 straddled 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 tech 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 to cross. 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 that, we made committees and boardrooms because that's what we do. We put them on billions of devices, and now we're just kind of stuck with it, and I think that's fine.
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 potty 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 creiological 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 Ologies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm at Ali warn on both Ali with just one l. Thank you to Aaron Talbert for admitting the Ologies podcast Facebook group with a syst from Bonnie Dutch and Shannon Feltis Merch is available at ologiesmerch dot com. We've got half and totes,
advisors and all kinds of things. Thank you to Susan Hale for handling that as well as making sure everyone gets paid. She does everything. Noel Dilworth 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. Smologies are also available. They're shorter,
kid friendly versions of classic episodes. Those are linked at aliwar dot com slash smologies, and thank you to Jared Sleeper and Ziegrodriguez Thomas of mind Gem Media for editing those alongside the wonderful Mercedes Maitland. 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 Emochi to because we are legally married, Jared Sleeper of mind Gem Media,
and the platonically loved Mercedes Maitland of Maitland 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 ologies team is just the best and I couldn't do any of this without them, So that is one non secret is 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 blendid 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 super glue 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, because it's that's a real pain.
Oh.
Also, did you know that there's an empty emoji? I just discovered it like ten minutes ago. It's 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 yu romatechord. So many Okay, go start up for bye pacodermatology, homeiology, cryptozoology, lithology, Yeah, technology, meteorology, paratology, apology, ceriology, selenology. Give it someone a real smile, We send an emoji.
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