Welcome to stuff you should know from how Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Smiley Faced Bryant and Jerry party face rolling. I got no emoji. I'm just Josh wink face. Sure, eggplant and peach. Whoa, I know that's dirty, but you can say eggplant and peach and get away with it even on the team. Sounds like a the lightful meal. It does. Actually it doesn't at all, but not at all.
It is cute for sure. I use the bitmoji now some some which I see is not even in this research. So I just thought to throw it out there early. I want to go on record as saying that my bit mooji is one of the best, because I'm honest, even do a bit moji? Do you even have that? Sure? I've going okay, because you know, you design your own thing. So I found that a lot of people's bitmoji's aren't very honest. You mean, the the the image of the person.
I said, you know, I got a little chubby bearded guy, and every time I sent it to someone there like, oh my god, that looks just like you. And I said yeah, because I'm honest, I didn't make myself a supermodel. I got you. I got you. I thought you meant you were just like like you'd say like I don't like that and mean it kind of thing. Now, I don't know if I've ever sent you a bit moji, so I'm gonna do that right now. I don't think you have checked in real time. What do you want? Uh?
You want me on an elephant? Yes? Or me crying in the rain because you're not near me. Can you cry in the rain on an elephant? I don't think I can bind either. One's fine, elephant, we'll do elephant. I love elephants. Well, I can't find the elephant now, so I'll diploy you a kiss. Okay, So what we're talking about today are not bit mooji's, although they would qualify as a sub type of this, I guess. But they use a lot of words. It's kind of like
when you're playing charades and somebody's like, that's close. That's close. It's like you can't talk, man, you have to just shut up. You have to charade it. That's the difference between bit mooji and emoji, and emoji is really what we're talking about today, which is a pictograph basically like, um,
a hieroglyph okay, but it's a modern hieroglyphic. Yeah. And I will also go on record as saying I don't really use emojis anymore because of the bit moji um and I don't use them that often, but it's always funny to send a bit moji to someone, like kind of go out on a limb and be like, should I send this? And then you get one back? Like I remember the first time I bit moji Hodgeman. I thought he's gonna think I'm just so stupid, and he sent one right back. He's on the bitmoji train. I
can buy that for sure. But I don't use the emoji as much anymore. But I did when they when I I guess they first kind of hit the scene on the smartphone. Um, and now I get a little I mean, kissy faces and stuff are fine, but I don't like when I just get like a thumbs up reply for okay, that's fine, or thumbs up is almost like I can barely tolerate you. Yeah, that's what it
feels like to me. That's what they're saying. I can't be bothered to type okay, Right, I say k K because it really kind of takes okay and and turns it even more personal. I always thought you were just jittery admitt to type k and just said it. No, I'm saying kak. So now you have legendarily fast thumbs. I do. It's from all the coffee I drink and
the speed. I will also say this that this article, and I mean I kind of picked it because well, I'm gonna be honest, we needed something a little easier this week because it's a tough week. This is a little more in depth than you may have thought, more in depth and like way more interesting than I thought. The whole history of it I thought was pretty fascinating. So let's talk about the history of it. Man. The the widely agreed upon start date for emojis comes back
in Night two, all the way back in two. And it wasn't an emoji that first came out. It was what are known as emoticons, the predecessor of emoji. Remember those days, And we're all just big dummies and type colin parentheses on a way. It wouldn't mean that that'd be that's not even a thing. Yeah, colin parentheses is smiley face. I was thinking quotations. Sorry, yeah, right, So colon in a parentheses either way is a smiley face or a frownie face. And that we can point to.
This is so cool that that they know who did this. But a guy named um uh Scott Falman, and he was either an admin or a frequent user or whatever had something to do with the message board, the electronic message board UM which was a very very early like chat room forum prototype back in two for Carnegie Mellon University. Yeah, which we did some time there. We served out of sentence there, we did. Now we did a little uh, a little short video Carnegie Mellon for days. Yeah, short
video for days. But yeah two he uh and I don't even know if you said specifically, but September nineteenth. They actually have the actual date, which is amazing. And he said on this bulletin board, if you put a smiley face using this actually he even gus seated up with the dashes the nose that they lost the dash pretty quick. I like the dash, do you it gets overdone? Do you know what I like? It's like it's a
horse face. What I like her? The people that are can do like a whole picture out of typing things? Oh yeah, like the Shrug Guy. Yeah that's no, no, no, I mean like this whole page would be a big rooster. It's like the kids and me, you and everyone we know. Yeah exactly. They had like the Book of Them that was the cutest touch. Yeah, good movie. That is the one movie that has ever done whimsy right and didn't go over the edge. It was whimsical to an exactly perfect,
non annoying degree. So every other movie with whimsy you hate, yes, okay, like hate. I do like Shrug Guy, though Shrug Guy, I've never learned it just copy and paste him. Well, I've never done it myself, but I just like the way it looks. And I thought that's creative because it looks exactly like what it is. Um And I was always partial to as well to the awkward which was
which was that Colin slash. Oh that one's kind of makes feelings about because it can also mean like wow, I'm really disappointed, or it's like sure it means that's why I like it. I think very versatile. It is versatile.
There's a lot to it, all right. So anyway, he said, if he used a smiley face with a colon and that dash in parentheses in your comment to say it's humorous, then I think we can avoid it was kind of used to clear up like the ambiguity of text and things like that, not texting, but you know, sometimes it's hard to read, like wait, does this person making a joke? Right? Right?
So if somebody was joking or being sarcastic, yeah, like he used this thing, you right, and then the person will know and we won't have an argument on the message board because the person will know you were joking, right, Yeah. And it started in and what as we'll see. What Falman hit on the head was the very point that emojis fulfill, which is they add context to plain text,
which is important. Yeah. So um, Falman came up with his triumphant victory, like you said, September nineteen, and now he's sitting on a mountain of cash and oh yeah, man, he trademarked it very wisely. So hope everybody's sending him the money in the time they used that emoticon, but before him and I thought this was super interesting. People have always, of course put little smiley faces and letters and things like that. So this was an extension of that.
But um, some historians say in Robert Herrick wrote a poem entitled to Fortune, and it seems as if he is purposely included an emoticon in a line upon my ruins smiling Yet and he puts a colon in a parentheses after the words smiling, And people say that may have actually been the very first use of this. I read the little article that had that, and there was
a um. There was a note in addendum and appendage, if you will, basically said and it was from an English professor who said that at this time, in what sixt in the mid seventeenth century, there was no no standardized punctuation, and so even a poet writing something sending it off to the printer would not necessarily expect the printer to follow his punctuation to a t. I think it's a bit of a lame explanation. Why even go
to the trouble. Maybe maybe this professor was saying the printer himself could have added this, and that it wasn't the poet's intent, and that it was just accidental. I'm not sure. I like to think that. Yeah, this guy had a tremendous amount of foresight and and in sixty Robert Herrick said, here's your first emoticon. Everybody, come back and find me in two thousand twelve. I'm gonna go
with that story. Okay, that's where we're going with. So we had the emoticon either beginning in six or definitely beginning in nine two, and that's all we had to deal with for a good thirteen years if it was the latter UM. And then in we finally get our first emojis, and we know where those came from too, and believe it or not, everybody, they came from Japan. I don't no surprise, right right. It was a company called n T t uh D Little Low Big Seed,
Little low M Little Low Como. We're gonna call it DoCoMo because that's what it spells. And they had to icons a phone and a heart. And this is when people um had pagers beepers. Did you ever have a pager? Tons? Did you really? You had like two or three at a time, depending on you know, what you needed. I don't think I maybe I did. I think when I got into the film business, I had to get a pager. But it was very very soon after that my first, like Nokia phone came into play. I didn't have a
pager for years and years. I didn't had a page of like a year, if I remember correctly. Yeah, I mean they were for those of you, for you kids out there. There's probably plenty of kids who listen to us to have no idea what a page is, all right, It's like a little a little I guess digital thing that was like the size of it was like the size of a cigarette pack. But you guys all vape,
you don't smoke cigarettes. It was smaller than that. Okay, it was the size of I don't even know what it was, the size of a very tiny cell phone. I guess we could say inches. It was about like two inches by an inch and a half, which is some unknown amount of centimeters, right. But it was a very small little box and you carried it with you
and clip that you could put on your belt. It was a magic little box because somebody would call a number that was associated with your pager and they would like type in their phone number after the beep and hang up or press pound I think afterwards. Then you hang up and then you got a little alert on that little thing you wore on your belt. Then it would be like bee. It was very annoying, and the person's number would be next to it, and if they really needed to talk to you, they put nine on
one after. So you would then pull your car over, find a pay phone, call the number on your pager and say you got the stuff. I'd be like, what's up? What's so important? Right? Yeah, that was how people communicate with one another before cell phones. It's really it seems like a hundred years ago, and it's really funny that it was the mid nineties, right, and then people said, well,
why don't we just make phones more portable? And they're like, oh, that's actually had thought about that, good idea, because I mean you had that bag phones and car phones at the time. It was a thing. So the the Japanese, the entire country of Japan had pagers in the early nineties. They were early adopters. Yeah for sure, and um this DoCoMo uh. They had a line called Pocketbell Pagers and they were the ones that first added emojis. There was a heart and a phone. Yeah. The phone meant call
me the heart very sweetly. I love that. The heart was one of the first ones basically sending a message of love. Uh. And then later on in the nineties, late nineties, I guess they streamline streamline that got rid of those icons because apparently uh pocket Bell pagers with a lot of business people that used them, and they weren't into it. So the teenagers were like, forget you, then, DoCoMo,
we're out of here. We're going to Tokyo messaging because they've got these little what would eventually be called emoji's. I love that that. Um, the docmo like they got all business like. They were like, we can't have the heart on there. Yeah. Um, that reminds me of probably my favorite Onion headline of all time. Man accidentally ends business call with I love you the greatest one ever. That's a good one. My favorite was always Drugs Win War on Drugs. Oh yeah, did you see the video
they made with I think Little Wayne. But they were saying the d e A Had tapped Little Wayne to go like carry out the war on drugs by doing all the drugs. Well just to picture of his face, yeah right, yeah, but they would they use like clips of him like on a on his tour of us trying to talk but he's just so waste. He's not even making sense, and but they clipped, they interspersed it in like it was a news report, and he was
doing a great job. It's funny too. After our ten years of doing this, we've gotten to do so many cool things because of the show. And one of my favorite things ever still is that when we knew people at the Onion, they took my picture one day and they'll still trot that out as Aria man and I will be My mug will be in an Onion article every now, and it's because area man. Yes, shout out Joe Randazzo for there. Yeah, back in the day, getting us in the office. All right, so should we take
a break. Oh god, we haven't yet, haven't we. Now, let's take a break and we'll be back to talk about where they went with Dokomo right for this? All right? Man? So DoCoMo said we're done with you kids, and then they said, oh wait, god, come back, you're like a third of our business. We had no idea. Um, Luckily they had an engineer named Shiga Takakura. You're really good
at the Japan much. I'm around it a lot, and uh I guess coud tasan Okay, we'll go with that he was working on a mobile internet platform called i Mode, and he said, you know what, we're just trying to get some pretty basic thoughts across here, like on a on like a mobile network, so like your phone, stuff like the news or the weather or something like that.
Headlines literally had news headlines and what the stock markets doing, or if it's sunny out so right, right, and stuff that's going to like repeat on like pretty predictable over like fairly short time scale. So it's gonna be sunny this day, and it's probably going to be sunny again, so you're gonna go back to the sunny thing over and over again rather than you know, typing out sunny. What if he just had an icon of a son, right,
And this is a huge breakthrough. And what this guy did was create the very first emojis for this imode platform. And he actually coined the term emoji two shigy taka kurita, that's right, uh. And there was a character e limit, a two character limit, which is kind of the main reason behind why we have emojis as good. So, like you said, he didn't have to type out sunny. You could use one character uh. And in nine it sounded
like the future back then. Remember it's crazy. Um he developed a hundred and seventy six of these initial emoticons for things dealing with the weather, sports, food and drink, love of course, and like you said, he made up the word E which was a picture emoji, which was character and that's where it comes from. Yep. So the thing was then you had how many did he come up with? Two hundred seventy six initial ones? Okay? Um, so the thing is is this this whole mobile platform
I mode and again this is we're talking about. Um. They they had like two fifty characters tops. But these broadband networks weren't invented yet. This was all like really low fi stuff still, so it was very much ahead of his time, so he kind of had to reverse engineer how to get these things across. They had a stroke of genius since there was a finite number of
these things. Rather than sending a picture from one phone to another when one user wanted to send that emoji, they stored the pictures in the phone and then you could activate those emojis from a simple too to alpha too I guess to bite alpha numeric code. So when your phone got the right alpha numeric code. It would produce a smiley face. Yeah. It really set the stage for what we have today. Yeah, you know, yeah, yeah.
Umi was over there at this time. She was in Japan teaching and she told me, like, you know, I came back and I was like, wait, we're not We don't have texts, like everybody texts. You don't have Hello Kitty right exactly. And it was like years before, Like Japan was definitely doing this fairly early compared to us here. Yeah. I remember seeing, um, the first handheld cell phone that
wasn't the big brick phone. I saw one of those in l a in the in the late eighties or early nineties, like on a literally in a Hollywood backlot, some producer had a brick phone, Like, oh my god. But the first I kind of cell phone cell phone I ever saw was in London, and I guess it would have had to have been ninety five or ninety six, and I had never seen one. Was like the big rectangle with the flip down mouthpiece and the pull up
antenna something like that. It may not have had to flip down, but it was, you know, it was smaller than a brick phone. Um, but I just remember thinking a while, like London, that they're on the leading edge of technology here. I've never seen that before. What in the world's that guy doing? Let me see that thing? All right? So many years passed more they called them. I don't even know how much they called them emojis
or icons back then. Probably well now the guy had coined the term emoji, yeah, but I just don't know if it was like the popular term at the time. I see, I think it was Japan. Okay. Yeah, again, ahead of the ahead of the thing, ahead of the curve. Yeah, I just want to make sure that that's been gotten
across very much ahead of the all right. In two thousand ten, a company called Unicode Consortium, well it wasn't a company, it was the Unicode Consortium or a nonprofit and they are a group of tech companies and volunteers from the tech industry that basically really understood this stuff. Saw the writing on the wall with the emoji on the wall and where it was going, and they says, why don't we do this. We need to create a library.
It needs to be standardized. Because I even remember early on with smartphones, you know, different platforms, someone would send you an emote, an emoji from an Android to an iPhone, it wouldn't come across. So they said, we need to standardize this so it can operate across all iOS devices. Yeah, or even if like the phones had the same emojis, they might not use the same codes, so you might
get like the opposite of what you're looking for. You're looking for a peach and you get a big right exactly, and they're like, wow, are you trying to say? Man? So there was there was this great need for uniformity, but it didn't come out until what what year was the two So this Unicode Consortium and the Daily Mail by the way, called it the Unicorn Consortium if you noticed, and I called it the Unicode Consortium either way? Can you pronounce it both ways? I think the Brits do that.
And that's when you saw your first cell phone, so full circle. Yeah. So, um, Unicode got together and they said we're gonna we're gonna make this this like collective, open source, nonprofit effort to encode these things and create a universal standard. And in doing so they've made what some people point to is we'll see as one of the first universal languages. Yeah. And also but it's not really um. Strangely, it's it shocked me to know that no one owns this. I love that there is no
patent or i P property rights to emojis. That it's great, but it's it's kind of shocking that something so ubiquitous some like no one's making money off of it. I love that it's wonderful and rare and so rare. That's why it's shocking them. It is now. Um, we should say that some people point to the Unicode Consortium being uh dominated by some major major companies. I think Google and Apple really have a lot of people in there. But again it's a nonprofit group and there are rules
that are followed. I think the implication is is that there if Google or Apple puts up some suggestions, which they do sometimes, they may have a little more likelihood of getting past than other people's emojis. Maybe probably uh. And then also since they're both American companies, the universal set of emojis tend to skew a little more American. Like hot dogs and hamburgers and French fries are there, and now they're just now starting to get to like
euros and things like that. Those are not too huge downfalls in return for this thing being open source and unowned by anybody except for the entire world, right. But one huge downfall because it's open source and anyone can do anything with these emojis is that we got the Emoji movie because some Hollywood executive was like, well, we don't have to pay for this. We can just go
out and make a movie. Will be the first one with an emoji movie, and since we don't have to pay for it, we can put all of that money into making something really great, and they did. I I didn't see it, obviously, but I remember when it was announced there would be an emoji movie. I just remember thinking, come on, well, it really delivered on on that reaction.
From what I understand, I mean think it was a bomb in all respects, but they still made like four times what they put into I think the box off million and they spent like fifty million on it. I don't know, but I will say this, I have no idea what it's about at all, but I know but my prediction, having not seen it or read anything about it, is that it was some dumb story about the different emotions coming together in the end to solve some problem.
I'm sure you're right. I'm sure Hugh Jackman was in it, and Jared from Subway was beaten up by a bunch of people. Yeah, and then there was a Sharknado. Although, um, the one of the guys who used to be on Silicon Valley, t J. Mitchell, J. Miller, Miller, he was in it. And so I was looking up the Emoji movie and he apparently is accused of making a bomb. Man, I saw that. Isn't that crazy? Yeah? He I don't I don't know how he's doing. That article made me
worry for him. He I think he got in some argument on a train with a lady and then and then was taken off the train and called in a bomb threat on the train that she had a bomb and you can't you can't do that, allegedly allegedly allegedly, yeah you can't do that, t J. Miller, that you really can't, man. But yeah, I lay all this at the feet of the Emoji movie because he was the star of absolutely what was he uh see the egg
plan of the Peach? I don't know. Well, if he was the star, then he probably would have been crying with laughter because in two thousand seventeen. I believe for three straight years US fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen, crying with laughter was the most popular emoji, which I have issue with that, and in two thousand fifteen it was Actually this is what I have a problem with. Oxford Dictionary chose it is the word of the year. I don't
have a problem with that part. Yeah, that shows Oxford Dictionary is keeping up with with the ever evolving language. Their descriptive ist not prescriptive ist. All right, that makes him a okay in my book, So what's your problem? My problem is that that means that crying with laughter is overused. None of the people maybe one hundreds of one percent of the people who sent the crying with laughter emoji actually crying with laughter over like laugh out loud?
How many people are like l o ol, Like that's not that's not what that means. Everybody, you ruined it. You ruined laughing out loud, and you're ruin in the crying. So you're saying, literally, if you're crying with laughter, is the only time you can send that, not just saying hey that's really funny. Yes, all right, I think it would it would be a much better world if that
were the case. Okay, I just think it's overused, and I think that's part of the I think that's one reason why everybody is so cynical and sarcastic, is because they're so out of touch with our emotions that we have the similatroom to stand in for us that instead of actually experiencing them, and everything has to be so
much bigger and bolder than it actually is. There's no subtlety your nuance, which is ironic because there's tons of subtlety and nuance in actually communicating with emoji, right, I mean there's like a medium laughter emoticon probably right, I'm sure probably. But it's the same thing is using exclamation points. You get trapped in it, you know what I'm saying, So, like, all of a sudden, if you take away the exclamation points, people are like, are you mad at me? What's wrong?
I've definitely gotten in texts exchanges like hey, do you want to go do this thing or whatever? And if someone sends back, sure you do that, or yeah, you do that a lot. If you just send back sure, it's like, well, I guess Chuck's not very happy about this. I guess I'll start adding exclamation points. No, but you shouldn't have to, is my point. You should not have to, and I think we just need to rip the band
aid off. I don't ever want to see an exclamation point for you again that you don't mean much less of double. The one that really is unsettling, though, was when when somebody replies with sure period and the s is lower case, that means that means things are not going well? Right? Then sure? Yeah? Don't You don't want me to be a funny because when I say sure, I mean sure, but that's how I say it my head. But I guess lower case sure period is definitely that's
saying something. Adding the period onto a lower case word, you're sending a message. But if you're not, if you're just saying sure like normally, that that's the problem Bloom with with text based um communication. It lacks context, that lacks emotion. So we're used to communicate any kind of text base. Yeah, that's what I'm saying, like, just just let right that. You have to add some sort of punctuation. That's the role that emojis fulfill. And we'll talk about
that after a break. How about that sure lower case period. Alright, so we'll go over some interesting stats here of people use emojis online. What that's a that's almost everybody, surprising, Yeah, and the other eight percent, I don't know. The other eight percent have their arms folding. They're like, I'm not gonna do it, darn it. That's right. Uh, we've been dancing around this peach in the eggplant thing long enough. Are we getting there now? Well we might as well.
So these have famously become uh stand ins for body parts, right, like the peaches, like the Almon brothers sense of the words, so what they meant? Yeah, I never really thought about that. Oh yeah, eat a peach. Huh. All right, so it soon became a thing to send a peach with an eggplant. I am so old and out of that loop that I didn't know this was a real thing. I didn't either until um this article, and I was like, oh yeah, obviously, especially after reading about it, I'm like, then you look
at the egg plane, You're like, um. Another uh famous
emoji is the poop i con. It's one of the most ubiquitous, very popular in Japan and has become huge in Japan popular in America with its fun little googly eyes, And I think didn't Google even have flies buzzing around the poop the first poop, which was a little much, frankly, but yeah, I think back in like two thousand eight or something like that, Google came out with their their own poop icon for Gmail two seven and they put flies around and it was just gross, um, but they
it's since somebody added the Google eyes later on and now it's like a mascot the poop. The poop emoji without the eyes is like gross, Like, what's wrong with you? Why would you send that? It's like sure, period, right right? But the poop with Google eyes is like sure exclamation
point right, Okay, I think you're right. I'm following along. Uh. And there's been a lot of kind of um I would call them folk controversies over the years, like last just last year, Goal in two thousand seventeen had a cheeseburger icon that had the cheese under the meat patty and people went berserk. That's really stupid that people went berserk, But it's also stupid to put the cheese under the meat. Yeah, it's just a weird choice. Did that. It's some the
person who make that never see a cheeseburger before. It's a really ducking stupid thing to do. But if it was somebody who really had never seen a cheeseburger before, then God bless them, and I feel bad for him for the outrage they created. Because even if even if they put the bun on upside down, even if they'd left off the ketchup, okay, it doesn't matter, it still
looks like a cheeseburger. Settle down. Sometimes I wonder if they do that, some of that stuff that these programmers or designers or coders or whoever does these they do that on purpose, just to rib people like, I'm gonna put the cheese. Yeah, We're going to set the internetut, And they did. Apparently the CEO of go goal Um, I did not know that this was the CEO of Google sundar Okay, he said, we are going to drop everything else we are doing to go sort this out. Yeah,
I imagined fairly sarcastically. I would think so sarcastic emoticon, right, whatever that is that is, Like, I don't know what that would be. I think you've got to use I don't know what you would what is a sarcastic emotive? I bet there's one people use and we're just not hip to. That would be my guess. Another word is old. There was a survey for match dot com that claimed that people who used emojis had sex more often than those people who didn't. Apparently, the wine emoji is huge
in Britain and Australians love their drug related emojis. We're gonna be in Australia, it's right, So we're gonna find out what that's all about when we went down enda. Uh, and of course we need to talk about the skin tone. Very early on it was um I think in two thousand fifteen, the Unicode Consortium changed the default skin tone to what they call Simpson's Yellow. But then you have the ability to tend them two different I think five different skin tones to represent um, you know, at least
five different shades of skin. Right, which was a good start, right, It was a good start. And there, I mean there's they are still just getting going. There's plenty that have been left off. Um like they just now are starting to add redheads to things and curly haired people. That's crazy, which is crazy, um cool that they're adding it. But yeah, there's there's always somebody whose feelings are hurt because they're
left out by the emoji people every year. They also say that too many smiley faces, Uh, if you're dealing with work, And if you're dealing with work, maybe avoid emojis would be my guess. It depends on who you're talking with. I mean, if it's a friend or whatever. Yeah, it depends on your job too. Yeah, if you're in banking, in your community, hating with the client you've just met. It depends on what job it is too, of course.
But there is apparently a study out there that said, um, contrary to what you think, using too many smiley emoticons don't increase your perception of warmth. They decrease perception of competence. I totally get that. But like the study was from oh,
the Journal Social Psychological and Personality Science. It was a two thousand seventeen study and they said, um, not only is it a smiley face emoji not a smile, it has some of the opposite effects, which is like, I mean, it totally makes sense if you think about it, Like somebody smiling, You're like, oh, I want to be around that person. Somebody's saying a bunch of smiley face and you're like, oh, what an idiot. You know, it's really easy to cross that line. Well, yeah, and it's also
really easy to get in trouble. Um, do do not send emoji threats because that's a real thing. There have been people all over the world that have been arrested for sending like handgun emojis two people that they were angry at and getting arrested. Yeah, for making like actual threats threats, right, that that counts legally, which so that raises, um some questions about what emojis are? Are they language? Are they are? There's actually I want to give um.
There's this guy I think he's a rapper actually named Young Jake y U n G Jake. So the absence of the oh and young indicates he might be a rapper Young right, Young Jake? You and Carl um. But Young Jake is an emoji portraitist. Man, that stuff was so cool, didn't that awesome? Yeah? So this guy does portraits of people, like really good portraits strictly from emojis layered in really interesting ways. He's got like a really great Instagram to check out too. Why you eng Jake?
But go check that one out. And then there's also a dude named Fred Benninson and he translated um Moby Dick into emojis. It's called emoji Dick. And every word of every line of Moby Dick has been translated into emojis. And this guy did this right. He hired three people to translate every single line, and then he had he hired another group of people who would look at each line and then look at the line of text and say, this is the one of the three that's the that
best gets this across for every line. So you can get Emoji Dick online for two hundred bucks. For hard copy two dollars, but I think he sells it by the PDF for five bucks and as Moby Dick represented by an egg plant in the peach, or at least the egg plant. So there's a lot of like, it's obvious that emoji is art, but there's a lot of people out there, linguists included, who are saying emoji she is words too, and it may be a language that's
developing in front of our eyes. It's pretty interesting as it stands now, though technically, if you're a linguist, it is not a language because it lacks grammar, which is structures that allow you to take words and put them into different combinations to create higher thoughts. Emojis do not yet allow us to do that because there's not real rules. Yeah, but there, I mean, there are people studying at this one article you sent a woman named Rachel Tatman Uh,
a linguistics PhD candidate from the University of Washington, Go Huskies. Uh. She did some studies like where she would show people pictures like photographs and then say, how would you emoji that description of that picture? Right right? And there are different pictures that were subtly different, I mean, they were obviously different, like the the first one was a man counting money, and she would say, would you would you say what this picture is doing by emoji man emoji
dollar bill or emoji dollar bill emoji man. And the results, I mean, it seemed like she didn't get a lot that were fifty fifty for any of these. It seems like most of them that she got were like seventy eight of people kind of citing one way or the other as far as far as far as order goes. So she believes kind of firmly that she's proven that
their bidirectional well, depends, It depends. So with the one of the man counting money, of the people said that they would they would depict that emoji wise with man and then dollar bill. And the reason why she said it was because there was an agent patient relationship. The agent was the man acting on the money the patient, and it was very clear. So there's really only one way to say it. Man money, man is counting money very much like a subject and a predicate in a sense.
That's one way they could act. They can also be um. They can also kind of describe the layout of a photo too, if there's not a very strong agent patient relationship, right, So her takeaway basically is that they can represent like the physical arrangement of things and also words. So there's another one was a picture of a man walking past the castle, and the castle's basically the big part of the picture and the man's pretty small, but the man
is in the lower right corner. So most people said that they would do castle man because the man is not acting on the castle. Castle is not acting on the man, but that's the yeah, and that's the way it's arranged in the picture. So she was saying that it can it can it can mimic the structure of sentences, and it can also mimic the structure of pictures, which makes emoji definitely their own thing. But the whole reason, the whole point of emoji, the reason that we use them.
There's a guy named Viv Evans think he's at a Banger University. He's a huge proponent of emojis as a new way to communicate rather than a step backwards, because you know, there's a lot of people, probably people who hate vocal fry or like emojis so stupid. Anybody who uses emoji stupid, And it's a giant step backwards for language, which is what why I think the Oxford English Dictionary was making such a statement by choosing the crying face
as the word of the year. They were they were casting their lot on the side of emojis as being a new form of communication. Um so, Viv Evans is like, yes, that's absolutely true. And they what they do is they stand in for things like gestures and intonation, things that are missing in its strictly text based message like texting or Twitter or an email. And that's what emojis do.
They add emotion, they convey nuance to it that otherwise in there, and they're fun sure, like get the stick from your peach, you can stick out of your peach and have a lot fun with emoji's. You know what's funny? Chuck is um the Apparently the mystery has never been solved as too exactly why eggplant is in there in the first place. It's kind of a weird one to add, considering we didn't have redheads until recently or curly heard people,
but there's always been an eggplan. It makes you wonder, Yeah, for sure. Uh and this is the last thing I've got was something you sent, which is kind of a
cool move. Apple wants to be more inclusive with their emojis, so they are proposing as a starting point and not a comprehensive list there proposing including emojis uh to represent people disabilities, so things like uh a man or a woman with a cane, prosthetic legs and arms, guide dogs, hearing aids, people in wheelchair stuff like that, right, and those would be part of Emoji twelve point oh, which
would come out in March of two thousand nineteen. And they just released Emoji eleven point oh to the publicum, which includes the partying face cupcakes? Is that what this huge list is? So these are all available now, they're going to be available on phones in August, but they were what the list was released to the public, and this this Unicode consortium. They take all these under advisement, but they also put him out into the public to say, what do you guys think about these two write um
and there's a few that they will never take. They never will will accept when of a living person, a deity, or a business logo, all those are off the table immediately. But then other ones they want to make sure aren't too specific. And then like the Golden Arches, you'll never see something like no, not as long as it's open source. But there are some pretty good ones coming down the pike this August. I wonder what super villain is. It's um Mustache. It's kind of like a doctor Stranger, Professor
Stranger or whatever, kind of like pop call cape. Yeah, it obviously gets across, especially when it's next to the superhero one that it's the super villain. I think my favorites coming soon are nazar Amulet. I don't even know what that is. I don't either, Mosquito that seems relevant there's there's one that's coming that's it's probably the best emoji of all time. The clown face. Oh, that's not a thing. It's really well done. Yeah, because that's so versatile.
It is, but it's also like a good looking emoji. Um, is it a scary clown or now? No, it's a great, perfect, universally beautiful clown. And I can't remember, you know, we did our clown episodes, so I can't remember if it's an August clown or what what type of clown it is, but it's a great clown. Um. And you can see all these by the way at emoji Pedia. I just saw it. Oh what do you think? Did you see it? Yeah, it's good. The guy who did Pennywise the I can't
remember which he's he's a Scars guard. That's why you say we don't know. We'll never know, but um, he did just an amazing job. Yeah. And I had no skin in the game. I had never read any of it or seen any previous versions at all, and I just thought it had a lot of heart and was creepy, and I thought it was really good. I thought it was good too. But you could also tell that stranger Things had come out while they were writing this, and they were like, oh, let's retool this a little bit
to really hit the Stranger Things crowd. I don't think that's true. I think it is true. I think they were I think that script was locked long before Stranger Things came out, and I think they retooled it. Uh, you got anything else on the kid from Stranger Things is in it? That was a little on the nose. I'm curious about the timeline there. So, Um, there's another one coming out to It's a dude with a frow who looks exactly like Slim Good Body. That's coming out
in the mod Slim Good Body. Remember the guy who wore the suit that showed his internal back in the day. Yeah, just like Slim Good Body. And then there's a mind blown one in a vomiting one too. But the clowns the best one. Okay, I'm excited. Do you want him more about emojis? Go out, go forth, start talking in emojis. It's pretty interesting. Uh. And since I said it's interesting, it's signed for listening to me. I'm gonna call this
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