Smiley Face Emoji Story

What's the difference between an emoticon and an emoji? Where did emoji come from? And is it a language?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Texts of technology with tech Stuff from hastaff works dot com.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I am your host,
Jonathan Strickland, Senior writer or how stuff works dot com.
And today I thought i'd cover a pair of related topics,

(00:24):
things that many of us have had plenty of experience with,
maybe don't know so much about when you get down
to it, and those would be emoticons and emoji. Now,
in case you are not aware, those are the little
pictograms or pictures that we send through various digital messaging
services and online social media in order to get certain

(00:47):
meanings and emotional intent across to one another. There are
lots of simple examples, such as the pairing of the
colon punctuation and closed parentheses, which makes a sideways smiley face,
though I should point out some cultures will flip this
around and do an open parentheses and then a colon

(01:08):
to be a smiley face which is flipped on the
other side. But honestly, that's just playing madness when you
get down to it. And there are more complicated versions,
like the emoji that seemed to cover very specific moods
or thoughts or concepts we humans have taken to communicating
through these pictograms in ways beyond punctuating a short message.

(01:29):
And I'm sure you've seen some messages that consist only
of those pictograms, and it ends up being your job
to kind of suss out what does that message actually mean.
I've played that game recently myself, where everyone was using
emoji to describe a movie, either by title or by
the plot of the film, and then it was everyone

(01:51):
else's job to guess what the film is. And it's
a fun game to play. You think of a film
that maybe is is pretty popular, like say Wizard of Oz,
and then you try and describe it using only emoji,
and it's everyone else's job to try and figure out
what film are you talking about? And some of them
are much easier than others. And again it depends on

(02:13):
whether or not you're describing the movie or the movie's title,
because sometimes the title of a film has very little
to do with what actually happens in the movie. But
these sort of games are becoming more and more commonplace.
But where did the idea for emoticons and emoji even
come from? Well, between the two, emoticons really predate emoji.

(02:36):
They actually predate emoji by a couple of decades at
least in the digital age. But obviously humans have been
using pictures to communicate since prehistoric times. Now that goes
well beyond the scope of this podcast. I know that
I like to give the history of stuff, and often
I would go way, way way back in order to
start with the foundation. But even I am not going

(02:56):
to go into talking about caves in ancient France that had,
you know, prehistoric paintings on the walls. That that goes
beyond even the scope of tech stuff. So perhaps we
can get one of the other shows at some point
to talk about the long history of using pictures as
a form of communication, and I can just stick strictly

(03:18):
to digital communication for the for the majority of this show. However,
the emoticon itself doesn't date back to ancient times because
processing power back then was pretty bad and it just
you know, you couldn't even really get a bit together
with the computers of the prehistoric age. However, there was

(03:38):
some debate about when it first appeared, and and some
people suggest that it first showed up in the seventeenth century,
as in the sixteen hundreds. Now I know what you're thinking, Jonathan,
You're saying frownie face. No one had a computer or
a smartphone, or a tablet or a cell phone in

(03:59):
the sixteen hundreds, extra angry face and You're right. But
a twenty one century publicity manager for the University of
Chicago Press named Levi Stall discovered what at first appeared
to be an earlier intentional emoticon. Now Stall was perusing
poetry written by Robert Herrick. Herrick was born in fifteen

(04:23):
ninety one, and as a young man he became one
of Ben Johnson's followers. He also took Holy orders in
six three and became a cleric essentially, but he is
chiefly known as a poet, with his most well known
work being her Sperities, or the Works Both Human and
Divine of Robert Herrick. One of his most famous poems

(04:46):
is to the Virgins to make much of Time, which
begins with the lines gather ye rosebuds, while ye may
old time is still a flying and the same flower
that smiles today tomorrow will be dying. Really cheerful stuff.
But that's not the poem that specifically caught Levi stalls attention.

(05:07):
The one that he was interested in was a poem
titled to a fortune, and that was first published in
sixty and the original publication actually contains the instance that
Stall said this might be an early emoticon. The first
two lines of that poem read as follows, tumble me
down and I will sit upon my ruins smiling yet.

(05:32):
But that smiling yet is a parenthetical. It is enclosed
within parentheses. So upon my runs, smiling yet is in parentheses,
and just before the final parentheses the closed parentheses is
a colon, And so it looks like one of those

(05:53):
little smiling emoticons that you would have seen in text
messages for the last several years. Colon, closed parentheses, smiley
face right. And as I mentioned, this was in the
sixteen hundreds. So Stall's reaction was, hey, this might actually
be a real instance of an emoticon, because the words

(06:17):
immediately preceding the symbols are smiling yet. So maybe this
is really a clever use of typography where the author
was intentionally including the colon and the closed parentheses to
indicate a smile following the words smiling yet. So this

(06:39):
could be a very clever show of humor. However, that
particular interpretation has been disputed by many scholars who point
out that not only were there other instances of the
colon parentheses throughout his works that had nothing to do
with smiling, like they were paired with words that had

(06:59):
no connection to the concept of smiling, but also punctuation
in the seventeenth century had not really reached the level
of guidelines yet. It was pretty chaotic, it was sporadic,
No one had really standardized it, so it's more likely
this was not an example of any sort of meaningful

(07:20):
expression or some sort of visual joke on top of
the layer of poetry. In fact, there are plenty of
examples of writers from the seventeenth century using unnecessary punctuation
before closing out of parentheses. There are other examples of
odd punctuation that met no accepted standard that arose during
the same time period, such as a comma and a dash.

(07:43):
There was no need for a dash after a comma,
but there were a lot of writers who were including
this because there had not been a widely adopted standard
in place. So it appears this smiley face was more
of a coincidence and not actually a sly jest. And
there's actually another example that predates Herrick's poem by a
few years and this would be the first example of

(08:04):
an emoji, not an emoticon. A seventeenth century notary in
Slovakia apparently used a little drawing of a face kind
of similar to a smiley face, although the mouth did
not have a big curve to it, so it's not
like a big smile. It was more like a circle
like your traditional smiley face, two dots for eyes, and

(08:25):
a little line that perhaps was a slight smile, but
not an exaggerated one. The notary in question was yawn
a lot of slides, and honestly, i'd probably just refer
to this as a little smiley face, not even an emoji,
except for the fact that this was apparently to indicate

(08:47):
that the form he was notarizing met with his approval.
So it wasn't that he was just notarizing this form,
which was a town document for a little town in Slovakia,
but that he was also saying, I approve of this.
I'm not just notarizing it. I approve of it. And
in that case it was fulfilling a function that emoji's

(09:08):
many centuries later would continue to fulfill. So you could
argue that perhaps this instant in early sixteen hundreds was
the first use of an emoji. But if Herrick's poetry
or Slovakian document wasn't really the origin of the emoticon,
what was What could have been a speech from the

(09:29):
sixteenth President of the United States back in eighteen sixty two. Again,
that's what someone thought might be possible. They were looking
at a transcript of one of Abraham Lincoln's speeches, and
the passage from that speech reads like this, fellow citizens,
I believe there is no precedent for my appearing before
you on this occasion. Open bracket, applause, closed bracket. But

(09:54):
it is also true that there is no precedent for
you being here yourselves a open parentheses, applause and laughter,
semi colon closed parentheses, and I offer in justification, and
so on. The speech goes on. But that semi colon
closed parentheses pairing looks like a winky face what we

(10:15):
would usually use as a hey, do you get it? Wink? Well?
Could that be the intent? I mean, the phrase that
immediately precedes it says applause and laughter. It might just
be a sly reference on the part of the speech
writer to say, look, how clever I am. We're gonna
pause for applause and laughter winky face because I'm so funny.

(10:39):
So it could have been an inside joke. I mean, obviously,
no one who's hearing the speech would have seen this.
This was something that was written down on paper. But
first of all, I hate stage directions and speeches like this.
This is just commentary on Jonathan's part. I hate stage
directions and speeches because it he suppose, is what an

(11:01):
audience's reaction to your speech is going to be. So
pause for applause or pause for laughter, or to phrases
I hate to see in speeches. It is a lot
of hubrists to assume that you're going to get applause
or laughter at those parts. Now, if you do get
those responses, you need to know how to ride them
out when you're giving a public presentation, so that you

(11:23):
can wait until it crests and as it begins to
die down, you can pick back up with your speech
and people will not miss what you have to say.
But there's nothing more awkward then watching a public presentation
where clearly there was a stage direction to pause for
some audience reaction and there's no reaction. It's just you know,

(11:44):
you might as well have that cricket sound effect playing
in the background terribly awkward. So, if in fact was
an intentional emoticon, it was incredibly bold to suggest that
I am so clever that clear people are going to
laugh winky face. More importantly, most scholars think it probably

(12:05):
was either a typo or it was a late example
of that wanton punctuation I had mentioned about the seventeenth century. Uh,
it may very well have just been one of those
elements where that was kind of a a habit on
behalf of the person who was writing the speech. Not
an indicator that this was an emoticon, but rather when

(12:27):
they would close out of parentheses, they would put in
this semicolon and then close parentheses, because that's the kind
of stuff we used to see a couple hundred years earlier.
The the point being that we cannot be sure this
was an intentional effort to put in some sort of
emotional intent within a written document, although it doesn't stop

(12:48):
people from sometimes citing it as one of the earliest
uses of emoticons. Now there is at least one nineteenth
century occurrence that was clearly intentional. It really was an emoticon,
not necessarily the way we use them today, but that
is exactly what it was, because we're told that's what

(13:09):
it is. This was back in one there was a
satirical magazine in the United States called Puck. Puck was
essentially what the Onion is today. It was satire and
it was meant to poke fun at different institutions and traditions.
So this was fully with that intent. There was a

(13:32):
piece titled typographical Art and it stated that the printing
press was now capable of creating expressions that rivaled those
made by cartoonists. This was sort of like any other
article in a satire. It was meant to make a
ridiculous claim and then provide evidence that in no way

(13:53):
really supports that claim. It's very flimsy evidence, but that's
where the humor is right. So specifically, article states, we
wish it to be distinctly understood that the letter press
department of this paper is not going to be trampled
on by any tyrannical crowd of artists in existence. We
mean to let the public see that we can lay

(14:14):
out in our own typographical line all the cartoonists that
ever walked for fear of startling the public. We will
give only a small specimen of the artistic achievements within
our grasp by way of a first installment. The following
are from studies and passions and emotions. Then underneath this

(14:36):
little paragraph there's a sequence of four different images that
are made up of letter press symbols like parentheses and dashes,
but they are oriented so that you can make vertical faces.
They're not turned on their side the way emoticons would
be later on. They're up and down, not left and right. Uh,

(14:57):
and you know, they just make very primitive looking face
says Underneath each face was a labeled to express what
the emotion behind that face was supposed to be. So
you had things like um, joy, melancholy, indifference, and astonishment,
and it was all just very simple shapes. The joke
being that the people in the letter press department are saying,

(15:20):
we can show off just as much artistic integrity as
your greatest cartoonists. So don't think you can walk all
over us, because our job is to set letters within
a printing press in order to create these copies of
the magazine. So it's a joke just saying we can
do what you can do. But clearly the actual evidence
was uh, severely lacking as far as subtlety or art

(15:46):
is concerned. Those images do not in a regular use
at this point. Remember this is predating things like typewriters.
This is still putting movable type onto a press and
then closing the press down. So typewriters and and the such,
we're not really accessible by your general public at this time.

(16:11):
So what about the smiley face itself? When did that
become a symbol for happiness? Despite these early examples, it
had not reached widespread adoption, and it appeared pretty late
on the scene. It didn't happen the way it was
shown in the film Forrest Gump. So there was no
cross country jogger involved. There were no giant puddles of mud,

(16:33):
there was no passing truck to splash anybody. None of
that had anything to do with the invention of the
traditional smiley face. That actually came out of a pr campaign.
There was an add creator by the name of Harvey
ross Ball, and he designed the smiley face. He was
working on a campaign to help improve employee morale at

(16:56):
an insurance company in the wake of several tumultuous at
positions and mergers that the company had just been through,
so employees were feeling stressed out, frustrated, nervous about their fate,
and the company wanted to try and turn things around
by creating a campaign of positivity. It took Ball about
ten minutes to come up with the smiley face design,

(17:18):
which included the yellow background, the slightly strange oval like
eyes like they're not quite the same size and orientation,
and then the not completely perfect, uh, parabolic arc that
is the smile. There's a little bit of imperfection there
that's purposefully put there, and it adds to the charm.

(17:39):
All of that was Ball's design. It took him about
ten minutes. He was paid the princely sum of forty
five dollars for his design, and neither he nor State
Mutual Life Assurance Company bothered to copyright or trademark the design. Uh.
The rest of the story ends up being kind of
less happy, but you know, let's tell it anyway. Because

(18:03):
there was no copyright or trademark protection on the design,
it was free for anyone to grab and use for themselves.
There's nothing to prevent them from doing this. And in
the nineteen seventies, two brothers named Murray and Bernard Spain
decided that they wanted to use this image. They appropriated
it and they used it in their own business. They

(18:25):
were owners of a couple of different Hallmark card shops
in the Philadelphia area, so they took the design and
they added a phrase have a happy day, not have
a nice day, but have a happy day, and they
added that to the smiley face, and then they applied
for a copyright, which they received, So they got a
copyright that was on a design that in part was

(18:46):
not theirs, that wasn't their creation, So they were able
to copyright this design and use it for themselves. They
also made a mint off of it because they were
selling buttons and cards and shirts all with this logo
and slogan on it, and it was incredibly popular during
the nineteen seventies. Meanwhile, over in Europe, in France to

(19:08):
be specific, there was a journalist named Franklin lou Frani
who registered the smiley face mark for commercial use in Europe.
He would use it to indicate news stories with an
uplifting tone in a paper in France called Francis. He
also was able to leverage this into a merchandizing boom.

(19:29):
He called his design smiley, and he was selling all
sorts of stuff like T shirts throughout Europe with the
the image on it. One could argue, however, that his
use of the smiley face to indicate items that were
of good news in papers was similar to what emoticons
would be used for today, So perhaps this counts as

(19:50):
an early emoji. But let's get to the official birth
of the emoticon itself as we think of it today.
This actually dates to the nineteen e e d s
in a computer lab at Carnegie Melon University. It's amazing
that we can actually track down the birth of the
emoticon as it is used today. Often these sort of

(20:11):
things end up being buried in legend and lore, and
we never really understand where something came from. It just
we can kind of point when it became popular, but
anything before that tends to be a mystery. Not so
in this case, because things that existed online have a
habit of sticking around, even if that online was just
online in the case of a of a local network

(20:35):
and not the Internet at large. Because we're talking about
most universities didn't have access to the Internet. Carnegie Melon
is probably an exception to that. But this was not
a Internet meme. This was very local on a bulletin
board system. So we can pinpoint the date of emoticon

(20:57):
creation two September nineteen ninety two. So here's what was
happening computer science students and other students who had become
interested in computers. Uh, we're using a school electron bullet
electronic bulletin board system or BBS to post messages to
one another. So this was a predecessor to the news

(21:19):
groups and forums that you would find over the Internet,
but this would be a decade before the World Wide
Web ever existed. To access a BBS, typically you would
use a dial up modem and you would call a
phone number that would be connected to a specific computer
that hosted the bulletin board system. Some of these bulletin
board systems could only have one connection at a time,

(21:41):
so you might try and call and get a busy
signal and you'd have to wait and try and call later.
You also had a lot of bolletin board systems that
tried to regulate traffic by charging per minute of use,
and that way you could cut down on someone just
hogging the bulletin board system just for him or herself.
But it was again like a precursor to what the

(22:03):
Internet would be. It was local, it was not the
entire network of networks. There was, however, a different problem
besides just how do you access this information? And that
problem was in miscommunication. It's a problem that still persists
to this day. In fact, as has always been the case,
some folks would post messages or responses that were intended

(22:27):
to be a joke, to be humorous. But when you
just post text, as all of you know, you have
no benefit of tone or facial expression or body language.
None of those other elements of communication are present, and
so sometimes it's difficult to suss out which messages are
being cheeky or humorous versus which ones are being serious

(22:51):
or sincere or outright insulting on purpose. It could be
hard to determine what is what. That would lead to
misunderstanding and misinterpretations. Sometimes that would completely derail any sort
of discussion about whatever the topic was until someone was
able to get everything back on track. So, in other words,
it was creating a frustrating environment in which time would

(23:13):
be wasted on stuff that really wasn't that important. And
that's when a student stepped in. Uh, it was the thirties,
thirty years old at the time. His name is Scott Falman,
and Scott Falman would come up with a solution to
this problem. Now. I'll talk more about that in just
a second, but first let's take a quick break to

(23:35):
thank our sponsor. Falman himself has said that he wasn't
the only person to suggest the use of some form
of indicator that showed intent, that showed emotional intent behind messages,

(23:56):
so that people could know how to interpret any given message,
particularly ones that are jokes, so they don't mistake it
for some sort of genuine request or statement. But there
was a group that had been advocating for some sort
of system that would either tell you a message was
serious or wasn't serious. According to Falman himself, about half

(24:19):
of the group were seriously suggesting that approach, and the
other half were kind of making a joke, thus illustrating
the need for the system in the first place, because
not even everybody who was saying we need this actually
meant it. Some of them were joking about it, so
I guess it was hard to tell since they hadn't
invented emoticons yet. There were several competing ideas that were

(24:41):
put forward to indicate tone and intent, and Falman was
the one who said that you should use two different
sets of marks to indicate what the message is all about.
So you would use a colon dash and closed parentheses
combination to indicate a joke that would be the smiley
face the sideway smiley face, or a colon dash open

(25:05):
parentheses to indicate a serious post that would be the
frownie face. It didn't take much time at all before
people started using the frownie face not to indicate serious posts,
but instead to indicate displeasure or frustration or anger. So
very quickly they began to appropriate that frownie face for

(25:27):
a purpose that was different than what was originally intended.
But it made sense because being serious doesn't necessarily mean
frownie face, right, You can be serious without being sad
or upset. Uh. They wanted to use that more as
an indicator that this is something that they do not like.

(25:49):
And so that's how that's how it came to mean
what it meant. It's the way people use It doesn't
matter what you intended when you created it, it matters
how the people used it. So creators in general find
this really frustrating when they make something and then their
audience ends up interpreting it differently or using it differently

(26:09):
than the way they had intended the creators. That is
the way the creators had intended, but that becomes the
right way to use it if enough people do it,
and that becomes the accepted way to use it. It
doesn't really matter what the creator originally intended. And it's
a very frustrating thing to come to grips with if
you are a creator, because you had a very specific
use case in mind when you were going about your

(26:32):
creative process, and then people go and muck it all
up by doing their own thing. Um, but that's life.
The system saw widespread adoption at Carnegie Melon and eventually
it found its way to bbs IS at other colleges
and universities and spread from there. So the concept of

(26:53):
emoticons was going strong and was going viral. Well before
the average person was using text messaging or instant messaging.
Not many people had any sort of cellular phone, and
text messages wasn't that really wasn't a thing yet, but
people were starting to pick up on this concept for
electronic messaging. Falman notes that many different variations of those

(27:14):
two basic smiles, including noseless versions, the ones that would
leave out the dash so you just have the colon,
and the open or closed parentheses. Those would appear over
the following years. Sometimes it was just an exercise someone
undertook to find clever ways to make recognizable images using
a limited set of typography, sort of as key art
in a way, and some people would just see what

(27:37):
sort of creative, complicated images they could make using all
these different set uh icons or set symbols. Falman noted
that the three sequences that were the most common that
stuck around, no matter what other ones people might create
were the smiley face, the frowny face, and the winky face,

(27:58):
which of course uses a semicolon instead of just a
colon in order to make it look like one of
the eyes is winking. Those were the three that he
said would get the most used, and other ones might
pop up now and again as a joke or as
a clever way of showing how someone had come up
with a new way to indicate a particular image, but
they didn't stick around as much as for the term

(28:23):
emoticon that rose sometime in the early to mid nineteen eighties,
but I could find no citation that pointed to the
origin of the word itself. Now we know that the
word comes from the combination of the words emotion and icon.
That's what emoticon comes from. It's the blending of those

(28:44):
two words. But we don't know who first coined it,
or at least I couldn't find any reputable source that
explained who first thought of calling these things emoticons. But
I think most people can easily understand how they come
in handy to help a recipient get the gist of

(29:05):
your intention. When you delivered a message, people understand the
use of it, even if they think that they're kind
of silly. You can't deny that it helps understand tone
and emotion if it's paired with another message. In person,
we use body language, we use facial expressions, we use

(29:27):
tone in order to get these subtle meanings across. So
we do this with our face to face communication all
the time. It only makes sense to create a system
to incorporate that in our textual communication, Otherwise we lose
an enormous amount of information that normally would be communicated
between two people if they were face to face. So

(29:49):
I don't want to mention say that emoticons are the
end all be all of communication, but they I think
they definitely have their use and they can really help
cut down on misunderstanding s, particularly when it comes to
doing things like posting jokes. Now, they also were more
useful than just language, because if you think about old

(30:10):
text messaging, you were limited to a hundred forty characters
or so a little bit more than that. Actually, hundred
forty I chose because that's Twitter, but obviously you know
with text messages it's a little bit more than that.
The problem with that is if you make a statement
and then you have to explain the emotional intent behind
that statement, it might double or triple the length of

(30:33):
the message you need to send, which means you either
have to send it in groups of messages so that
people understand what you meant when you texted what you texted,
or you could use an emoticon, which sums it up
in a very simple picture made up of these, you know,
bits of typographical symbols. So for the sake of brevity

(30:56):
and being able to get across that intent within the
constraints of digital information, it made a lot of sense.
So as cellular phones became popular, people began to adopt
the use of emoticons more and more. It was a
convenient way to get that meaning across. It was also
helpful if you wanted to express an emotional reaction to

(31:17):
something but words just didn't seem adequate. Maybe it would
seem trite or just not the right response. I've had
plenty of situations where I would text a smiley face
to somebody instead of saying something like that makes me happy,
because seeing a text that says that makes me happy

(31:39):
seems a little off putting to me. I can't even
put into words why. But if I get a thing,
if I get a message that says that makes me happy,
because there's no tone, there's no body language, there's no
facial expression. It feels like something a serial killer might
send to me because it's so flat in text. But

(31:59):
a smiley face that says it all. I get it.
You're you're approving, you're smiling, You're happy at the thing
I just said, Uh, the same thing was sad. You know,
Sometimes saying I am sad for you or it just
doesn't quite work and sending the picture people get the
idea of this is the emotion I am experiencing when

(32:21):
I see the message you have sent to me. One
thing I find really interesting is how emoticons have evolved
in different regions. So in the West here in the
United States and Canada and Europe, the style tends to
follow Falman's example with all the expressions turned to the side,
so you have to cock your head ninety degrees to

(32:42):
see the faces upright because everything's sideways. Colon open parentheses
are closed parentheses. Sometimes you might see people swap the
order around because usually it would go top to bottom
by reading left to right. So again the lander the eyes,
and the closed parentheses, for example, would be the smiling lips,

(33:05):
so that's top to bottom, left to right. Some people
would swap that where they go right to left for
top to bottom. They're crazy and you probably shouldn't trust them,
but they would do it the opposite way. But still
you would have this horizontal alignment instead of vertical for

(33:26):
the faces. But that's not the way it is all
over the world. In other parts of the world, you
would find a vertical representation. In Japan, that's the kind
of emoticons they would use. Now, this particular style is
still emoticons and they were called carol moji uh. This
style used a few more symbols than the Western versions did,

(33:49):
largely because the Japanese digital keyboards had to have a
lot more symbols in order to get across the written
language of Japanese, so they had a lot of different
symbols to work with, and they could build out images
that look like upright faces. It also ended up indicating

(34:11):
the elements of a face that are more important for
reading emotion in the Japanese culture as opposed to the
Western culture. In Western culture, the emphasis is on the mouth.
Is it a smile, Is it a frown? Is it indifference?
By the mark of just a straight line. Those are
typical for the Western depictions of emotion, But in Japan

(34:34):
the eyes are more important. So if the eyes are
positioned in a in a high position, it tends to
express joy. So you build out this little image using
these various symbols that are grouped together, and some of
the symbols are representing eyes. If they're in a high position,
that would mean happiness. You could also choose different images

(34:59):
for the mouth that would indicate a smile or a
laugh or something along those lines. Symbols that made the
eyes look like they were clinched shut, such as the
less than and greater than signs. Those could be used
to show displeasure that you're you're scrunching your eyes closed
because you're not happy. So again, the eyes are more

(35:21):
important here than the mouth would be. Also, because they
had more symbols, they could use lots of different shapes
like stars and hearts and things like that that were
kind of in webb ding or wing ding styles in
order to indicate or or to increase the number of
expressions that they can make with emoticons. The adoption of

(35:44):
the cell phone and later the smartphone was really off
the charts in Japan. Japanese cultures flocked to cell phone
technology faster than you saw and other parts of the world,
and partly because of those limitations of that technology, you
started seeing more use of emoticons in text messaging because

(36:06):
again it allows you to get across these emotional feelings
without having to spell everything out. But these style of
pictograms all had one thing in common. They consisted of
various symbols grouped together to create a similacrum of an emotion. So,
in other words, it's not really a smiley face. It's
a colon and a closed parentheses, so it's two different

(36:29):
symbols that together kind of look like a smiley face.
That's an emoticon. Emoticons are made up of individual symbols
that collectively appear to make a picture. Later you would
get the birth of the emoji. These are actual pictures
things like a smiley face. It's not a representation of

(36:50):
a smiley face. It's an actual smiley face. And as
the difference between an emoji and an emoticon, they are
not interchangeable. Emoticons are made up of individual symbols that
have been grouped together to make a better picture or
a bigger picture, I should say, and emoji are actual
images that have been crafted for the purpose of digital distribution. Now,

(37:14):
before I dive into this topic, I want to give
a shout out to an uh AN author and a
researcher named Vivian Evans. He's got an upcoming book titled
The Emoji Code, and Mr Evans Publishers sent me an
advanced copy of this book, so I used it as
one of my primary research sources for this episode, specifically

(37:35):
about emoji. Became in very handy, So if you see
the emoji code available. I believe it goes on sales
starting in August of this year. Uh, it's very interesting.
It has a lot to do about emoji and about
language and communication and psychology. It's got a lot of
different topics wrapped up in it, not just the history

(37:58):
and UH and and social use of emoji, but really
the psychological elements of language and communication and what separates
a language from a code. So check that out. But
to start with what exactly is an emoji? Well, the
word again is a combination of different words. Emoticon was
emotion and icon. Now with emoji, we're talking about Japanese words.

(38:22):
The e means picture and moji essentially means written character,
so picture written character altogether. Unlike emoticons, which represented stuff
by using common symbols, these are actual designs, little drawing,
small pictures of whatever it was you wanted to send,
so there is a difference. There are plenty of programs
that today will automatically convert emoticons into emoji, So with

(38:47):
a lot of different messaging systems or social media platforms,
if you were to do the colon closed parentheses instead
of seeing that emoticon, it will automatically convert it into
a smiley face emoji. Uh. Different programs will stylize this
in different ways, So depending upon which platform you're using,

(39:08):
it might appear like a smiley face in one design,
and if you're in a totally different platform, it could
look like a smiley face of a completely different design.
But in both cases you understand what the underlying message is.
They might look different because they are different instances of
the same idea, but you link it back to whatever

(39:29):
that core idea was. So for example, if I used
Google and I was sending a smiley face, and a
lot of those Google messaging systems, the smiley face would
come across as a little smiling Android because that's the
Google mobile operating system. But other systems might just have
a more traditional yellow smiley face, and others might have

(39:50):
it keyed directly into whatever their user interface looks like,
so that it it matches the rest of the design
of whatever me a platform or messaging system you're using.
Emoji first debuted in Japan in the nineteen nineties. At
that time, Japan was developing a mobile phone internet platform,

(40:11):
which was the precursor to the mobile sites that you
might encounter today when use a smartphone to browse the web.
Emoticons have been incredibly popular on cellular phones, and emoji
were seen as the next step. The Japanese company in
T T. DoCoMo was working on building this platform and
incorporated emoji into the user interface. In the beginning, there

(40:33):
were one hundred seventies six emoji characters available. Today there's
more than fifteen hundred variations that allow for different skin
tones for different faces and also to more accurately represent
the variety of features that humans can possess. Not to mention,
there are a ton of emojis for inanimate objects, for animals,
for countries. There's an enormous number of them now. The

(40:57):
rise of the emoji in the West really began in
September of two thousand eleven. That's about how long it
took for smartphone penetration to really reach a height in
the United States. By then, they had become consumer electronics.
You gotta keep in mind that before two thousand seven,
most smartphone owners were either bleeding edge tech adopters or

(41:20):
they were business executives who were using smartphones as personal
digital assistants, and no one else really needed a smartphone.
They weren't. The mobile web wasn't good enough, and the
interfaces for smartphones weren't intuitive enough for them to really
make a break into the consumer market. But then that
little company called Apple came along and introduced the iPhone,

(41:43):
and they really designed an amazing interface for smartphones. It's
not necessarily what I would have wanted. I mean, I
never bought an iPhone, but it did make using the
smartphone sexy and easy to understand. And by smartphones had
been dominating the market enough where emoji started to show

(42:07):
up on various digital keyboards, so it became common enough
to warrant a new approach to expressing emotion online. As
Evans points out in his book, the Rise of the
Emoji has also led to a decline in certain abbreviations
like l O, l j K, and OMG, which stand
for laugh out loud, just kidding, and oh my God.

(42:27):
Those used to be ubiquitous across the internet and across
the web, but now because of emojis, they are used
less frequently. People will use an emoji that's associated with
those abbreviations to get that feeling across, and some programs
will automatically translate those abbreviations or those initializations into the emojis,

(42:52):
and heck, the messaging system I use on Android will
even suggest emoji for certain common words, such as displaying
a little cartoon piece of cake if you write the
word cake. This is cute if you're sending a message
to somebody, like if I were texting my wife about
cake and it showed a little picture of cake, I
might want to use that, but it's really irritating if

(43:13):
you're I don't know, trying to create a food diary
entry into your fitness app. Cough cough. This happens to
me a lot. Cough. So it turns out my Fitness
Pal recognizes the word chicken, but it isn't so good
at figuring out what a little cartoon chicken means. So
I wish that this setting wouldn't automatically um pop up,

(43:36):
because I have on occasion typed in emojis into my
fitness tracker app and I've had to go back and
edit it. First world problem, if ever there was one.
Gosh darn it, this cartoon chicken is ruining my fitness
application I have running on my smartphone. Now that I
say it out loud, I'm actually ashamed that I even
brought it up anyway. And Evans's research he found that

(44:03):
of all smartphone owners in the United Kingdom had sent
messages containing an emoji at some point or another, and
fort of all smartphone owners had sent messages consisting of
only emoji with no text accompanying it. So they were
using emoji exclusively in some messages to communicate. Meaning that

(44:23):
doesn't mean that they were only text in emoji, but
that at some point or another they had only used
an emoji to get an idea across and not used
any text along with it. And there have been a
lot of examples of various personalities and news outlets posting
messages or headlines using only emoji. Now this is kind
of interesting. There's a governing body that determines what is

(44:45):
and isn't an official emoji. That body is a nonprofit
organization called the Unicode Consortium, which sounds kind of ominous,
so maybe we need some sort of shady emoji to
put next to that name. But the purpose of the
group is pretty straightforward. It's to create, maintain, and promote

(45:05):
software internationalization standards so that we don't encounter issues when
tech in One part of the world attempts to communicate
with tech in another part of the world. It would
be really frustrating if every time you try to send
data to a device that was across the world, you
ended up getting an error message because there was some
sort of incompatibility with the way you were sending that message.

(45:28):
So if you were just getting a message on your
phone and all it was showing was blocks, just empty blocks,
because the phone was unable to interpret what those emoji meant,
then you're losing all meaning entirely. And of course, the
purpose of emoji is to help get your meaning across
to someone. So if there's no emoji there, if the

(45:50):
way I'm receiving it is incompatible with the way you're
sending it, I miss out on that intent. And it
could be that I misinterpret your message or that I
just don't standard at all, because if you're communicating primarily
through emoji, all I'm getting our empty boxes. Well that's
the purpose of this organization. It's not just for emoji.

(46:11):
That's only one part of what they do. But emoji
does have a standard, and by creating this international standard,
they can ensure that various platforms are all able to
interpret the same code so that they can display a
relevant image so that when you receive it, you understand

(46:32):
what's being sent. According to this consortium, emoji are pictographs
a k a. Pictorial symbols that are typically presented in
a colorful form and used inline in text. They represent
things such as faces, whether vehicles and buildings, food and drink,
animals and plants, or icons that represent emotions, feelings, or activities.

(46:57):
The consortium determines the standards for how emoji should be designed.
For example, each character should have an emoji variant, which
can even include animation and a text presentation. Text presentation
tends to be black and white or monochromatic. The standard
goes on to say, a text presentation must be a

(47:18):
simple foreground shape whose color is determined by other information
and does not change. So if you were to have
a text presentation of an emoji within other text, you
could highlight all that text and change the font color,
but the emoji itself should remain whatever the original color was.
You cannot change it just by changing the color of

(47:38):
the text. Its color is independently determined from the color
of text itself. The standard ends up saying that, well,
you need both of these things, and they both need
to have the same core concept at play, but they
can be very different designs. So, for example, an ice

(47:59):
cream cone, the emoji version might be very colorful. It
might be a little golden cone and then maybe a
pink blob of ice cream, maybe even a little melting
drop coming off of it, Whereas the text representation might
be an icon that clearly has a cone and a
little circle on top, and you would look at that
and say, all right, well, that that's that's an ice

(48:20):
cream cone. Because the cone tapers. I figured that's an
ice cream cone. It's not a microphone, it's not something
I'm not gonna mistake it for something else. And while
the two instances look different from each other, they both
link back to that same core concept. And that is
absolutely critical with emoji. It has to link back to
that core concept, or else it's not relevant. It's sending

(48:43):
the wrong message. So you couldn't have an ice cream
cone that could be mistaken for something else like a
fire hydrant. That would end up causing massive community communication problems.
I mean, if you send me a message says today
is really hot, let's go out and buy a fire hydrant.
I'd say that's no, I don't even know how you

(49:03):
would do it, and then we'd have a breakdown in communication.
So there are very specific rules that you have to
follow in order to create these emoji, and I'll get
into some more of those rules in just a minute.
But before I get into that, let's take another quick
break to thank our sponsor. The first country that ever

(49:32):
created its own emojis for the purpose of national identity
was Finland. Finland created Finnish emoji that you couldn't find
anywhere else. Uh. For example, they had one of a
person in a salma because it's Finland, the country where
I'd quite want to be pony trekking or camping or

(49:54):
just watching TV. If you get that reference that I
just made, tell me, because I will be impressed and
will bestow upon you my good wishes because I have
nothing else to give away yet. These emojis, these Finish emojis,
were not actually part of the Unicode standard, so they

(50:16):
did not become universal because again those Unicode standards, that
was an international standard. And while these emojis were popular
in Finland, they didn't have a whole lot of application
outside of that country. So they didn't become part of
the general lexicon of emojis, so they are an emoji,
but not an official emoji from the Unicode standpoint. Now,

(50:41):
when an emoji does become standard, it can be included
on digital keyboards across all platforms and devices. Otherwise you
could be limited to a specific program to show particular
types of emoji. There's an example I can give right
away because I saw it earlier today on Twitch dot tv.
One of the emojis you can post is a Bob
Ross emoji. Bob Ross emojis are adorable, but they are

(51:04):
also unique to Twitch. They're not going to be across
all platforms. Now. One thing that has to be true
no matter what platform it's on is that they should
be identifiable to that core concept that was chosen in
the first place. So if you send me that ice
cream cone emoji, that's what I should see on my screen,
regardless of the program. It might look like a different

(51:26):
type of ice cream cone to me than it did
to you, but it should be readily identifiable as an
ice cream cone as opposed to some other object like
a yo yo. There have been some interesting campaigns to
get certain emoji adopted by the Unicode Consortium. For example,
when it comes to food emoji, we have Taco Bell

(51:47):
to thank for the taco emoji. That Taco Bell they
organized a petition on change dot org, and it might
be one of the few times I have ever heard
of an online petition that actually created enough moment to
get something done. And I might be a little snarky
about that, but honestly, I think a lot of online
petitions ultimately don't accomplish much. In this case, it accomplished something.

(52:11):
I don't know that it was anything necessarily world changing,
but it did get tacos added to official emojis. There
was also a businesswoman named ye Ing Lu who was
successful in petitioning the consortium into adopting a new food emoji,
and that was the dumpling. This became known as the
Dumpling Project. She argued that it should become an official

(52:33):
emoji to join the other ones that were already represented. UH.
A lot of the foods that were represented involved foods
that were popular in Western cultures pizza, hamburgers, especially American culture.
Not a big surprise seeing as how the web was
so dominant and the United States was very dominant on
the web. But people like yeing Lu wanted to have

(52:56):
representation of other cultures, and so she argued that the
dumplings should be adopted, and ultimately it was. And to
be fair, dumplings can also appear in very different forms
around the world, so it's not it's not something that
is peculiar to Chinese culture. It is also in others
as well, in different forms. There lots of different types

(53:18):
of dumplings. There are certain rules that you have to
follow if you want to submit an emoji. Now, first,
there are certain subjects that are just against the rules,
and this is where the bob Ross one would fall apart.
You cannot create an emoji that represents any real person,
alive or dead. So the bob Ross emoji would not

(53:38):
pass muster for the Unicode emojis because it breaks that rule.
That's off limits for Unicode adoption. Deities are also verboten.
You cannot have a UH and an official emoji that
represents a religious specific religious figure, so you won't find
emojis representing Buddha or Jesus, for example, and you have

(54:01):
to pass more subjective standards as well. For example, one
of the requirements is that the emoji must have widespread appeal.
In other words, this is what the Finnish ones would
not have met. The person in as Sanna's probably not
going to be as widespread as it would be in Scandinavia,

(54:23):
so it doesn't really fit that criteria. However, this is subjective.
How do you determine how popular something must be before
you say it has widespread appeal? I don't know how
they answer that question. It might be something that is
a case by case basis. Some of them just end
up being judgment calls, and sometimes it can take a

(54:46):
while for the group to reach any sort of consensus
on it. So it may be that something gets that
gets dismissed early on is accepted later on because people
have changed their perception and say, no, this has a
wider ap you old than we first thought, and therefore
it has merit. As an emoji and there are tons

(55:07):
of stories of emoji being used in clever reporting or
marketing or playful ways. But there are also a few
stories that are a lot more serious, such as the
case of Osiris Aristi. In the winter of Aristi posted
some messages on Facebook. He had a publicly available Facebook profile,

(55:27):
he did not have it, posting specifically to friends, and
he was posting lots of angry messages, particularly about police,
and one of those was a message made up of
emoji that included a police officer emoji followed by three
gun emojis that were pointed toward the police officer, and
on January eight, police arrested Aristi, charging him with making

(55:53):
a terrorist threat against police, among a few other charges.
That terrorist charge would later be dropped, but it was
a precedent showing that emoji do matter, that people can
interpret that as actual serious language. Um made a lot
of headlines at the time, and there were other charges

(56:14):
that Aristi ended up getting called up on, but that
particular terrorist charge did not hold up. It was it
was dropped after about a month of the proceedings. Evans
argues that emoji aren't a language in themselves, but rather
are a code, which I agree with. I would also

(56:35):
suggest that emoji could eventually become more than just a code,
but that would require some other elements for emoji to
actually qualify as a language. It could end up being
something similar to what we see with sign language. And
you've probably heard of sign language interpreters. You might even
know sign language, but the reason we call them interpreters

(56:57):
is they have to interpret the meaning people ache when
they sign and then turn that into some other form
of language like English, because sign language, uh isn't just
a visual representation of language. In fact, that's not what
it is at all. Sign language is not a visual
version of English. American sign language is not just hand

(57:19):
gestures that relate back to English words. Sign language is
in itself its own language, with its own vocabulary, its
own rules of grammar, sentence structure. All of the things
you would find in any other language, they are present
in sign language. So when people who learn sign language

(57:40):
as an additional language learn it, they are frequently doing
a more direct interpretation of English and then translating that
into signs. People who are using sign language natively are
communicating ideas through sign language. It's not filtering into English
and then in a sign language, it is straight into

(58:02):
sign language. It is a language like any other. Emoji
don't qualify as that. Emoji do not have a codified
set of rules and grammar that they can follow where
you can expect to get your meaning across. Emoji depend
heavily upon pre existing languages, and that also means that

(58:23):
they tend to follow the logical course that our languages
follow for all of our respective cultures. What I mean
by that is English has a very specific grammatical structure.
We have a particular word order we associate with intent
and meaning. So if I were to try and spell

(58:46):
out a message in emoji, it would likely follow a
pattern that would be similar to what I would say
if I were speaking those words out or typing those
words out. But if you came from a different culture
that had different grammar, different word order and sentence structure,
you might try and express the exact same concept I'm

(59:09):
talking about with a completely different order of emoji, because
you would be following the logic dictated by your own
language rather than by English. And because of this, emoji
don't have a universal set of rules to follow. They
cannot really be a language. It is more of a code.
It's a codified version of an pre existing language that

(59:33):
tries to get those concepts across through pictures rather than
through words, but they're still following the grammatical rules in
general that words follow. To wrap this up, I thought
it'd be fun to talk about some of the most
popular emoji, which is turns out a very difficult thing
to determine. I actually used a tool called emoji tracker

(59:54):
dot com to look at real time feedback on which
emoji we're getting the most frequent use on Twitter. I
do not recommend looking at it if you suffer from
UH seizures like if if visual cues can trigger a seizure,
don't look at emoji emoji tracker dot com because there's
lots of stuff changing rapidly as you look at it

(01:00:17):
in real time. But first place easily goes to what
is often referred to as face with joy. It's also
the the laughing so hard tears are coming out emoji,
so it represents that you're so overcome with joy that
you're crying tears as a result. Second place would go
to just a simple heart emoji. Uh, that's adorable. Third

(01:00:40):
place would go to the smiley face that has hearts
for eyes. So you see that the first few all
have to do with joy and love, which is nice. Uh.
It's only when you get to fifth place on emoji
tracker dot com that I saw the first sad emoji,
where it was a sad crying face, and seventh when
you get your first true displeasure emoji. Not just sad,

(01:01:03):
but I do not approve of this kind of face. Now,
Twitter is just one source. The University of Michigan actually
conducted a study back in to look at the most
popular emoji. They found similar results across the board. The
face with joy emoji was still number one in their
In their search, it appeared more than twice as often

(01:01:24):
as the second most popular emoji, which again was the heart. Uh.
The okay symbol as in the circle made with the
forefinger and thumb that was in the top ten. Uh.
Ninth place went to the first sad crying emoji, so
sadness did not get in the top five, but it
was number nine. The see no Evil monkey was number thirteen,

(01:01:48):
and number twenty was clapping hands. I was amazed that
Pooh didn't make the top twenty. Twitter issued a report
in twenty sixteen that gave indications the most popular emoji
include eating a breakdown by country, which I found absolutely fascinating.
In the United States and in Canada and the United Kingdom,

(01:02:08):
it was an expression of dismay. It was an open mouthed,
sad eyes expression. It looked like someone wailing and let's
be fair. Two thousand sixteen was a pretty freaking rough
year for a lot of places, so you can imagine
why the UK and North and North America had this
sort of despair face going South America was all about

(01:02:30):
music in ten they were all using musical note emoji,
holding the number one spot in various countries in South America.
Mexico was the high five emoji, and uh you had.
Spain's emoji was the arm making a bicep muscle pose,
so you know, showing them the guns. So there was

(01:02:51):
just one guns, the right arm. So Spain apparently was
very um muscular. Remind been some machiesmo in there, I
don't know. Germany was given everybody the old thumbs up.
In Italy, France and Japan all had different variations of hearts,
like one had like a heart with a little arrow
through it. One of them had a heart with little

(01:03:11):
wings attached. But yeah, they all they all were very sweet,
whereas South Korea was getting super romantic with a lips emoji,
you know, like a lipstick mark. Smoochy smoochy. Hey, South Korea,
call me, I hope you're not upset about those Samsung
episodes I did where I talked about your government in

(01:03:32):
the end. Emoji and emoticons can help us get those
messages across with less of a chance for a misinterpretation
of our intent, or they can be used to completely
baffle our audience or present a challenge. What the heck
does it mean if I post an airplane, cake monkey
and Irish flag in sequence? I'll never tell, but I

(01:03:52):
do hope you enjoyed listening to this episode. If you
have suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, you can
send those to me. You can send them via email
the shows addresses text Stuff at how stuff works dot com,
or you can always drop me a line on Facebook
or Twitter. The handle for both of those would be

(01:04:13):
text Stuff h s W. Remember I live stream my
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check out the schedule see if you can join us
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(01:04:36):
look forward to seeing you there in the near future,
and I'll talk to you again really soon. Winky face
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