1096. This week, we look at the world of emoji with Keith Houston, author of "Face with Tears of Joy." He discusses the long history of emoji, from ancient origins to early computer character sets, and the formal process of proposing new emoji to the Unicode Consortium. We also look at how emoji can be blends of multiple characters and tell us more about cultural, generational, and political attitudes.
1096. This week, we look at the world of emoji with Keith Houston, author of "Face with Tears of Joy." He discusses the long history of emoji, from ancient origins to early computer character sets, and the formal process of proposing new emoji to the Unicode Consortium. We also look at how emoji can be blends of multiple characters and tell us more about cultural, generational, and political attitudes.
Keith Houston - Shadycharacters.co.uk
Keith's book - "Face with Tears of Joy"
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[Computer-generated transcript]
Mignon: Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty. And on these Thursday shows, we talk about things that are generally interesting about language. And I am here with Keith Houston, who runs the blog âShady Characters.â He has a book by the same name, âShady Characters,â which is fabulous, and he has a new book called âFace with Tears of Joy,â all about emoji. Emoji are also just a fascinating thing that we do with communication. Keith, welcome to the Grammar Girl Podcast.
Keith: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Mignon: Yeah, so you know, emoji, I was surprised they go back much farther than I originally thought. Can you talk a little bit about what was the first emoji?
Keith: I think it depends on what you mean by emoji. So, are smiley faces on prehistoric pots, for example, just a couple of dabs of ink or soot that show you a face? If you then wait, get into the medieval period, and a lot of readersâinterestingly, not writers of books, but readers of booksâwould draw little pictures in the margins to call out something interesting, little pointing hands. And there are lots of pointing hand emoji. So you go from, okay, there are smiley faces and hands that look a bit like emoji.Â
Eventually, you get into 18th-century Japan, and people are printing books which are composed not of Japanese logographic writing but of actual picture, that are entire stories told using only numbers and little pictures. If you like, well, what is that? Is an emoji a yellow smiling face? The first of those was designed in the 1960s, or the most iconic oneâthe one that everyone would recognizeâwas designed by an American graphic designer called Harvey Ball in the 1960s.Â
But if you finally get to an icon on a computer screen, then we're still not at an emoji. Before smartphones and before kind of smart devices, just as the home computer was becoming more popular, some of these computers had what were calledâwell, all computers have what are called character sets. This is a list of characters or symbols the computer knows how to display. And some of these fairly early late seventies, early eighties ones have got characters like little smiley faces and suits of cards and arrows and so on. And the idea was these could be used in games that used characters to represent, you know, whateverâa whatever, I guess a game of cards or wandering around a dungeon or something.
So these electronic icons have been around for quite a long time as well. But finally, if you wait until you get to 1980s Japan, this is where the first things we might think of as being emoji, I guess, or canonically think of as being emoji. So a collection of little icons that you can put in amongst your text on an electronic device and then send them to another device. And it's not reallyâŚ
Mignon: Is that like the Zap Dingbats font? Was that sort of one of the earlier character sets, or do you consider that more one of the first emoji?
Keith: So Zap Dingbats is really interesting. When people printed things, when people still had to set type by hand, you know, plucking little lead characters out of these big trays and composing entire pages, they would use what were called pi fonts. So whenever they needed a special P-I, as opposed to P-I-E, whenever they needed a special characterâa mathematical character, or an arrow, or a hand or somethingâthe regular fonts wouldn't have these. So they'd go to a pi font, find the thing they needed to put it in, and then put it back again.Â
Zap Dingbats is an electronic pi font. It's just a collection of characters. Back in the late eighties, early nineties, there were too many computer character sets, and you could send a document from one computer to another, and they could disagree, and you'd see just garbled text on screen. So an organization was formed called Unicode to unify all of these different character sets together. Zap Dingbats were quite popular at the time, and they said, you know what? We'll just take all of these, put them into this standard called Unicode, and people can use them. And that was fine. They were there. And then finally, when Unicode got interested in emoji in the early 2000s, they realized they already had lots of emoji characters in the standard because of fonts like Zap Dingbats and other pi fonts. So they're kind of separate, but it's convergent evolution, perhaps?
Mignon: So they kind of converge. But the first emoji, what we would think of today as emoji, were on Japanese phones, and the word âemojiâ does come from Japan, right?
Keith: It does. So it means roughly âpicture character.â But it turns out they were actually slightly earlier than phones. The phones were, I think, in nineteen ninety-nine, just before that. You may remember that weâpeople, humanityâused to use these personal digital assistants, little palm-top computers. They weren't necessarilyâŚ
Mignon: Oh, right.
Keith: Right? Like a Palm Pilot. Many of these were made in Japan by companies like Canon, Sharp, and Fujitsu. And it turns out there's one particularâI think it's called a Sharp PA something or other, PA 8000. This appears to have the first emoji set, but perhaps even before that, weirdly, Japan didn't really take to the home computer for quite a long time. And in some ways, it still hasn't in the same way as the Western world. But what a lot of Japanese people did use were word processorsâa kind of combination of a printer, a keyboard, and a tiny screen. And you could enter emoji in some of these word processors. So first, it looks like it was word processors, then these little PDAs, and then finally phones and smartphones later on. So it was a source of some frustration to me that I could never really put my finger on one device or one icon and say, "This was the first emoji." There's a spectrum; there's a very long tail, but it's back to front.
Mignon:Â Yeah, and you probably have an opinion on what's the plural of emoji? Is it emoji or emojis?
Keith: I think in Japanese it would be just "emoji" rather than "emojis." And so I try to use that throughout the book. But honestly, I don't know; I find myself sometimes typing "emojis" without really meaning to, so use whichever feels most natural, I think.
Mignon: Nice. Nice. So, you know, there's so much to say about emoji. So howâwell, first, okay, so you talked about the Unicode Consortium. So if you want to make a new emoji, it's actually a formal process. Can you talk a little bit about the Consortium and what they do?
Keith: It is. It's a really weird setup. It's a nonprofit corporation that is basically supported by a pile of big tech companies like Google, Apple, Meta, and so on. And they pay something like $50,000 a year to be members, and there are quite a few of them. And this company or this nonprofit has the job of maintaining this single character set that most computers understand. I think something like 98 or 99% of all web pages useâoh, sorry, use Unicode. And they have a process whereby you can propose a new emoji. You can say, "I think this symbol should be added to the current set of emoji," and they will evaluate your proposal.Â
You need to prove a number of different things. That can't be a copyrighted icon. There needs to be some demonstrated level of need or support for it. It can't be too close to an existing emoji. They prefer it if it fills in an obvious gap in the emoji standard. So it turns out to be quite tricky to get a new emoji accepted. And in fact, Unicode has said lately that there are too many emojis, and they don't really want to just keep on adding them. So there's a, there's kind of an effort at the moment to slow things down and to say, "Can we get away without this?" But there is another subtlety in that Unicode gave themselves a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card. Normally, what happens is if any new character goes into Unicode, the Unicode Consortium argues it out. They vote on it, they approve it, it goes to a whole other ISO standards organization that, again, is ratified. Unicode said if you can devise a new emoji that's made up of existing emoji and you kind of glue them together with special hidden characters, then they don't need to go through this full sort of approval process.
Mignon: This part was fascinating. Yeah, so some emojis are blends of two characters. Am I remembering right? Does that change how they're stored on the computer? Do they use less memory when they're made that way or more?
Keith: Yeah. So, what happens is there'sâI'll pick an example. My favorite example: there's a service dog emoji, which is a dog wearing a little high visibility vest. Under the hood, this is a dog emoji and a special kind of glue character called a zero-width joiner, and then another one, which is the safety vest emoji. So, the safety vest emoji plus the dog emoji on screen is displayed as a service dog. Now it's almost like you're spelling a word; you're spelling an emoji word by composing multiple emojis together. But the weird thing is, there's nothing magic here; Unicode has said there is a symbol called "Service Dog." And the way that it is spelled is this. So your computer isn't magically taking a dog and a safety vest and figuring out how to put them together. It knows that if it sees these two things, it actually means another thing. So, there are quite a few subtleties in the way this works, but the upshot is it means that some emoji can be really costly in terms of how much storage they require, or if you send a message, it doesn't matter in most modern systems; we've got plenty of bandwidth, plenty of storage. But in an SMS message, for example, an old-fashioned text message on a phone, if you use some of these emojis, they can take up the same space as two, four, or eight normal characters, depending on what it is.
Mignon: And is that something that if I know the secret code or something, I can blend any two emojis? Can I make a service dolphin if I want to? Or is that something that has to be done by the platforms?
Keith: Unfortunately, Unicode has to build yourself as your service dolphin for you. This is the thing. As neat as this is, it's not magic. It still needs a human to say, "We need a service dolphin emoji." And they need to agree on it. And they need to say, "Well, this is going to be a dolphin and a zero-width joiner and a safety vest. And, you know, these together will constitute a service dolphin.â Nice idea, though, I feel.
Mignon: Yes, I like it too. You said that Unicode feels like maybe there are too many emojis, and I have to say, when I'm looking for one on my phone, especially when I don't have access to search, I feel like they're almost infinite. How many total official emoji are there?
Keith: It's really hard to say. It changes from year to year, sometimes multiple times in a year. But broadly, actually, let's explain why it's difficult. So you have the first individual characters. They were brought over from fonts like Zap Dingbats or brought over from Japanese mobile phones. A yellow smiley face is just one character. That's easy enough. A picture of a human face, whether it's a child or just a regular person or an older person, that's also just one emoji. But if you want them to have a different skin color, then that is more emojis. There's a special emoji you can append, which will change the skin color of certain emojis. If you want to transform them from just a gender-neutral person into a boy or a girl, or a man or a woman, or an older man or an older woman, that's another emoji that comes along and has to be appended. And so you have some of these kinds of primitive emojis, basic ones, which are just single characters.Â
You've got lots of other composite ones like the service dog, service dolphin, and you've got a few other kinds of special ones, like flags, for example. So every emoji flag is two characters. So for the UK, there's a special letter U and a special letter K that, when they're put together, turn into a UK flag. The US flag is a U and an S, and so on. So what all this means is that there are, depending on how you count, about 1,400 kinds of basic emoji and about 3,800 when you take into account all the composite ones as well.
Mignon: Wow. Yeah, that was one thing that really surprised me about your book is how political emoji actually are. Like, I forget what country it was, but the other day I was looking for a flag emoji, and there was not a flag emoji for the particular country I wanted one for. And then, you know, I'm a Mac user, and I didn't realize, like, Windows just doesn't even support the flag emoji. You said they just don't want to get into it because it's so political, and it was just, it was fascinating. And then I think probably the story that people would be interested in, that they wouldn't have thought of maybe, is the one about a person with blonde hair and the history of that and how it makes it different.
Keith: Yeah, the person with blonde hair is quite aâit is quite a boring looking emoji. It's just a person with blonde hair. It turns out that it's quite an old one. It was one of the ones that was imported from Japan. The Unicode kind of looked well, we look at NTT and KDDI and J-Phone and all the different Japanese mobile vendors, and they just put all of the emojis together. It turned out that two of them had blonde people as emojis. One was a blonde woman; I think one was a blonde man. They just kind of imported it. They said, "Okay, we'll turn this into a blonde person. We'll bring this into Unicode." But they also brought in a couple of other emojis from Japan as well. One of them was a person wearing a turban; one of them was a person wearing a particular sort of Chinese cap, a kind of a kind of sort of small skullcap. These were emoji that existed in Japan, and they were kind of a little bit problematic in some senses.
So it turns out that there were emojis that were effectively meant to represent the stereotype of a westerner, the stereotype of an Indian person, or the stereotype of a Chinese person. And I guess it was an earlier type. It was not unacceptable; It was perhaps it wasn't as unacceptable to do that sort of thing. They were brought into Unicode, and now they're in Unicode. They were only brought in order to maintain backward compatibility with emojis that already existed. But Unicode never removes anything. This is why they're so strict about what goes in, because they will never take anything out. So these are now in there as kind of reminders that we live in a different time, perhaps a better time now.
Mignon: It's like the Oxford English Dictionary. They never remove a word.
Keith: And I'm sure there are offensive words in there.
Mignon: Yeah, so the person with the blonde hair emoji originally was representative of Westerners, in general, and then when people wanted, you know, the big emoji set to be more inclusive and have people with all different kinds of hair. Like the blonde person with blonde hair was already there, but it had a different meaning to start with. I just thought that was so interesting.
Keith: Yeah. Hair color and, well, I guess Unicode basically went through what they do is every year or so, they look at the emojis that exist and think, do we need to extend this? Do we need to change this? And there were a few years where really big changes happened. So, I mean, to be honest, a lot of emojis have been quite problematic for a long time.
So one of the first big updates was to add professions that were no longer gender-specific. So often you'd see a police officer, and they'd be drawn as a man, and you might see a police officer drawn as a woman. Unicode went through a process of saying, this isn't really cool. It should be possible to render these as a man or a woman. And then later as actually just gender-neutral. It shouldn't matter. It's so tiny a lot of the time. I think that the gender of emojis is lost on me anyway.
Mignon: Honestly, often, I can't tell what they are. They're so small. If it's not what I know.
Keith: Yeah, so it shouldn't matter in a sense, and yet it was quite a big deal at the time. So gender was a big thing. Skin color was another big thing. There was one year where suddenly emojis went from pretty much uniformly light-skinned to yellow-skinned, but you could alsoâas in bright yellow, cartoonish yellow âchoose a kind of, you know, a spectrum of colors from sort of white, very light-skinned through to quite dark, black-skinned emojis as well. And then hair was a kind of a later addition. Apparently, there were lots of petitions for people asking for red-haired emojis and work done to have people with red hair, people with curly hair, which was a kind of, you know, sort of kinky Afro, African, or African American hair. I think it's debatable as to whether it's been very successful. There was red hair, white hair, curly hair, and no hair. But blonde hair was left because there was always this one emoji, which was just a person with blonde hair. So it again, that the hair update was good, but it didn't apply to very many emojis. And in some ways, it's still incomplete, I think.
Mignon: It's so complicated, and you talk about how there are emojis now, there are emoji seasons. Like, the release of new emojis is an event kind of like it's emoji season. We got a new set of emoji, and people get excited. I remember I was excited about the maracas emoji because in my example sentences, Squiggly often plays maracas.
Keith: Oh, I see. Okay. That's handy.
Mignon: Yeah.
Keith: Yeah, I can't claim credit for the emoji season name. I think that was Jeremy Burge, who founded Emojipedia, who invented the term. But yeah, there was this, for a long time, there was this kind of yearly bonanza, yearly harvest of new emojis where lots of tech websites and everyone, you know, newspapers, kind of gossip magazines, and so would all pile on and see what the new emojis were that year. And they were occasionally a little bit controversial. Again, you know, the hair update was like, well, where's this sort of hair? Where's that sort of hair? Often what happened was there was a bit of an outcry, you know, so it was plain that emojis were quite biased initially towards Japanese culture and towards, you know, a very binary man versus woman type view of the world. And so Unicode has chipped away at these. And so some of the emoji seasons have quite significantly improved things, which is nice to see.
Mignon: Yeah. And as you said, that's why it's hard to count because there are modifications of all the, some of the individual emoji now too. You can apply all these different things to them.
Keith: Yeah.
Mignon: You know, let's talk about emojis in communication. You know, you said the majority of emoji users actually don't use emoji for their actual, like, literal meaning. And I started thinking also, so your book, like âTear Face with Tears of Joy,â like what does this emoji mean? I use this to mean laughing hard, but that's not the same as face with tears of joy. Am I using it wrong?
Keith: Well, that's a really interesting question. Suppose what is the emoji, what is the face with tears of joy emoji? It's a collection of pictures that, or sorry, a collection of pixels that depict the face of some abstract being who is crying with joy. That's what it is. That is the face value of that emoji. And so even just by appending it to the end of a sentence, maybe a joke, or you're responding to, you know, saying, oh, that's really funny, and you put that at the end, you're already using it in a sort of metaphorical way. You're not saying, âI am a small, round yellow person who's crying with tears of joy.â You're saying, âI am crying with tears of joy.â You're already abstracting its meaning a little bit. So I would argue that almost no emoji is used literally to refer to the thing that's depicted. But there's kind of, I think there's a kind of spectrum as to what that can mean. So sometimes people use an emoji in just an ironic way. So, you know, if someone tells a joke, which is obviously very bad, and you post a face with tears of joy emoji, you don't really mean that. You know, you're being sarcastic or ironic.
Mignon: Yeah.
Keith: You can also use emoji in kind of a metaphorical way. So I think lately, a lot of people, I say lately, probably for a few years now, people often use a skull to mean I have died of laughter. It doesn't mean I've literally died. It means that there are skulls around here. It just means I'm dead because I died laughing. So you're using the skull in a metaphorical way. Red flag is sometimes used to mean this is problematic behavior. It doesn't mean I or anyone else is waving or possesses a red flag. It's just like a literal translation or a literal use of the name of that emoji to mean something different from the depiction of the emoji itself. You can use them as the sound. So if you have a bee emoji, that can be a bee sound. You can use it as the word "bee." Yeah, pretty much anything. So I think even the shape of emoji, I've, I think I've seen people use, there's a kind of jazz hands emoji, and that has, it's been suggested that people are using it to mean the letter W because it looks vaguely like a W.
Mignon:Â Oh, like when I want to say âwhateverâ to someone, I could send the jazz hands emoji.
Keith: Yeah. So now you're already again, yeah, there are layers of metaphor there. Right? That's really interesting.
Mignon: And there are generational differences too. Like I'm not sure Gen Alpha would get my "whatever" reference maybe, I don't know. Like âŚ
Keith: A Gen Alpha? Is that where we are now?
Mignon: Yes. So, do people from different generations use emoji differently?
Keith: I think, I mean, I'm not an expert in this aspect of emoji, so anything I say should be taken with a pinch of salt. But my impression is that a lot of things are actually surprisingly common. One of the emoji that I looked at in, weirdly, a lot of detail is the poo emoji or the poop emoji, the smiling poop, which was one of the very first ones brought over from Japan. And there have been a couple of surveys fairly recently that show that no one likes it. It doesn't matter whether you're Gen Z, a millennial, or I guess Gen Alpha. No one likes the poop emoji. It's like consistently voted to be one of the least popular emoji, and it's relatively rarely used.
So it's like at the bottom of the leak table again, depending on how you count different emojis. So there are consistencies, I suspect, where things change, it's in that metaphorical sense, the use of a skull. I think that might pass by a lot of, potentially of my generation, or maybe I'm just really uncool, maybe older people that would pass by. And I think it's that kind of very specific, almost fashionable use, just the same way that slang is fashionable and becomes, and it just sort of slides, you know, appears from nowhere, then slides out of use. I think it's exactly the same thing. And I think in some ways emojis are just as expressive and difficult to characterize as any other language.
Mignon: And speaking of other languages, like people in different countries use emoji differently too. So, you know, the most popular one in one country may not be the most popular one in other countries. What are some of the interesting differences that you found when you were working on the book?
Keith: I think one of the biggest differences was there's one particular paper that looked at exactly that. It looked at emoji use in different countries and characterized emojis as kind of either positive or negative. Oh geez. There were so many different ways. There were so many different axes in which they looked at particular emojis.
But the one thing that stuck out with me was that basically every country in the world had face with tears of joy at the top of the list, apart from France, where it was a heart. And I thought, it feels like, you know, Paris is terribly romantic. France is terribly romantic. It feels appropriate that that was different. I think there's a lot of other less exciting ones, perhaps. And again, I think a lot of them come from when emoji just kind of were imported. You know, a good 700 emoji came out of Japan, and so they had, they were vested with lots of cultural meaning that a whole pile of emojis that don't really make a lot of sense or are not very useful if you're not Japanese.
There's one called the moon viewing ceremony, which is a particular holiday or particular observance in Japan that I think makes little sense unless you follow the Shinto religion, for example. There's another one which looks like, depending on how you look at it, either a pit in the ground with some steam coming out of it or a plate of hot food that's actually the Japanese cartographic symbol for hot springs or onsen. So there are some things which can be difficult to interpret just because they're unfamiliar. But then there are others like the poop emoji, where it's pretty clear what it is. But just the word in Japan, which I think is "unchi," kind of carries a connotation of luck or serendipity. So it doesn't have the same cultural meaning. The poop doesn't necessarily have as negative a meaning as it might do over here. But again, there are 3,800 emojis, and it becomes really difficult, I think, to generalize about how things differ from one country to another.
Mignon: Yeah. Bringing up the hot springs one that reminds me, one thing I didn't know that was so interesting in your book is that there are a few emoji that can be used in web addresses. So the peace sign and that hot springs emoji, you can do âŽď¸.com and â¨ď¸.com, and they will take you to an actual webpage. I, well, I tried the peace one yesterday. I don't know for sure. Is that still true of the hot springs one?
Keith: I think it is. All of this goes back to the Unicode Consortium. It's in some ways both interesting and sort of depressing, but it all leads back to a bunch of people in a boardroom somewhere in California. So again, we talked earlier about how Zap Dingbats were just brought into emojiâsorry, brought into Unicode because it was popular. People used it a lot. It turns out that some of these early symbols, like the peace symbol, before Unicode called them emoji, before Unicode had a notion of what emoji was, they already existed on our computers. We could still use them, and web addresses are administered in different jurisdictions around the world. And some of them said, yeah, you can have a web address with one of these custom symbols in it, or one of these special characters in it, if you like. I think it's clamped down on now, so you can't really buy any new ones, I think, at the moment. And in fact, most of the ones that exist take you to a page that says, "Hey, you could buy this very distinctive domain name if you want." So they don't take you anywhere useful. They just take you to somewhere where you could pay lots of money to buy âŽď¸.com or whatever.
Mignon: Yeah. âŽď¸.com just went to something that was under construction. It wasn't an interesting webpage or anything, but, and yeah. You said in the book that you can't have a new one. It's just these sort of legacy ones. They existed, so now they have to keep existing. But it was fascinating. I had no idea. So, you know, wrapping up theâyou know, you wrote this whole book about emoji, so I consider you now, you know, one of the world experts on emoji, and I'm curious if the experience of writing the book changed the way you think about them or changed the way you use them yourself.
Keith: I think I'm maybe a bit of a stick in the mud, so I didn't use them very much beforehand. They were kind of an object of fascination. I, you know, I got to the emoji book. In some ways is this sequel to âShady Characters,â my first book, which is all about unusual marks of punctuation. And I think for a long time, this is a bit introspective. For a long time, I was trying to figure out what I was writing about, and I think it's kind of weird forms of information technology, I think. And emoji just seemed like the obvious place to go. I remember after finishing one of the books thinking, what shall I do next? And at the time, I think it was the sort of the mid-early 2020s, five years ago. It feels like a lifetime. I was looking for something to write about, and it just seemed so obvious to write about them. They were ubiquitous; they were everywhere. So I think if it's done anything, I think it's given me quite an appreciation for the fact that there is this new facet of language.
It's really hard to think of a time where, in a span of, you know, let's call it 25 years, we went from not having this form of language or this feature of language to a whole new set of characters, a whole new way of expressing ourselves. It's staggering. I mean, you know, I genuinely find it hard to think of anything else which had that effect. I did, I asked a question on Twitter, I think at the time. I said, "Can anyone tell me what, you know, what else has happened in the history of language like this?" And it was things like, well, the invention of hieroglyphics. Hieroglyphics came out of nowhere in about a hundred years. And also the technology of writing, so papyrus, pen, and so on, all just arrived in this big bang in ancient Egypt. And I think someone else suggested Shakespeareâlike Shakespeare coined so many words in such a short period of time that he really changed the face of, or certainly expanded the face of the English language. And emoji. It maybe seems a bit heretical to mention emoji in the same breath as hieroglyphics or Shakespeare, but I don't think it's unreasonable to look at them in the same way.
Mignon: Yeah. Well, thank you, Keith Houston. The book is âFace with Tears of Joy,â which I'm relieved to hear that I'm not using wrong. Where can people find you, Keith?
Keith: Well, my website is Shadycharacters.co.uk, and you can find me and all my books and all other ways to reach me there.
Mignon:Â Great. And we're going to talk about one of your other books. So for the main show, this is the end, but if you're a Grammarpaloozian, if you support this show, we have a bonus segment for you coming up. Keith has another book called "The Book" that is all about the technology of the book, and it's really fascinating. So we're going to talk about that next in the bonus segment. But for the rest of you, thanks for listening.Â