Before we get into today’s idea: Today is the official last call for The Journal of Wordplay, though you can get in touch with me if you need a little extra time. And now, on with the show…
There were basically three uses I had for emoji at the Ubercross Abecedaria G.
Straight up “translations”:
🐑 (SHEEP)
🌧🌊😭 (FLOOD). The “loudly crying” emoji suggests both a FLOOD of tears and the anguish a more literal FLOOD might cause.
Word substitutions:
It might help you set a 📄 (TYPEWRITER).
He wears a lot of 🩹🩹🩹🩹 (MUMMY).
And accompanying “nudges”:
Bugs 😒 (BOTHERS). The annoyed frowny face here helps steer the solver away from an answer like “insects.”
Game of threading string between your hands 🐱 (CAT’S CRADLE). Though there are emoji that correspond to “string” and “hands,” the cat-head emoji instead hints at the language of the answer.
The third usage was closer to the way emoji are actually used “out in the wild” than the other two. They’re often there to clarify or illustrate verbal messages. Only in a few cases do they function as full-blown substitutions for words. Claims that emoji qualify as a “language” don’t take this symbiosis into account. No one speaks emoji, and no one writes only in emoji.
This would be true even if the emoji “vocabulary” included everything that could work as a simple picture—which it definitely doesn’t, and we’ll cover the reason for that in a little bit. But first, consider the paragraph above. Could it be “translated” into emoji? How?
How would we indicate the past tense like “was” or modifiers like “often” or “only”? How to visualize verbs like “clarify” or “illustrate,” or nouns like “language,” “substitutions,” “symbiosis”?
I can imagine emoji that might encompass these concepts—a magnifying glass for “clarify,” a pencil drawing something on paper for “illustrate”—but if you tried putting them all together, you’d end up with an impenetrable mess. And while texting teenagers love to use language that their parents don’t understand, that only works when the teenagers can understand it themselves.
Even all the potential emoji in the world is a much greater set than the number of emoji one can actually use. There’s no emoji for “crossword puzzle” in your phone’s vocabulary, even though it’s not hard to imagine one like this:
Why is that so? Blame the Unicode Consortium. Although you shouldn’t blame them too much. They’re doing their best, probably better than you or I could.
The Unicode Consortium is a group that presents and enforces international standards for communication devices. These agreed-upon standards are why, when I send an emoji from my Samsung phone, it’ll look mostly (but not exactly) the same on an Apple phone that receives it. I could send them my tiny crossword image as well, but the phone would recognize it as an “image” instead of an emoji, so I couldn’t mix it with text as freely.
The Unicode Consortium, and its Emoji Subcommittee, have approved over 3,600 emoji at last count. That’s way more than you’ll find on your phone, and still a drop in the bucket compared to the number of visual concepts that could be emoji.
So emoji are sometimes defined as “a small digital image or icon used to express an idea or emotion.” But the second definition— “whatever the Consortium decides it is”—is still a relevant one, if you try to use emoji for any practical purpose.