145: Face With Tears of Joy (live with Keith Houston and friends)

Welcome and live show introduction

0:00Hi, everyone. Daniel here from Because Language. This episode is about emoji, and how can you have a show about emoji if you can't see them? So, to all of our audio listeners, there's video of this episode as well. Find us on YouTube or on our website, becauselanguage.com.

0:30Hello, and welcome to this special live patron episode of Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. My name's Daniel Midgley, and with me now is my friend and collage, sorry, colleague and friend, Ben Ainslie. Ben, sorry, it's a little early here in Perth. Good morning, Daniel, all listeners, through the time vortex that is what we do. I am operating on, ooh, I'm going to say about an hour and a half of sleep, because we organised this thing, and then I also organised going to a party, and I didn't want to not go to the party.

1:13So, here I am, having partied hardy. I can't remember who, which pop cultural person entreated us to do that, but I listen to them, even if I don't know their name. So, if I am a little bit slow, or quiet, this is why. But I am, boy, howdy, am I glad to be here and to see everyone's sparkling faces from around the globe. I was wondering which version of Ben we were getting. Were we getting the just groggy, woken up version, or did we get the Ben punching on from the party still? And I think the answer is both.

1:45Yeah, yeah, I think it was just enough time to not be punching on, but not enough time to have fully entered the grog. So, I am, I am, I am in a, I am in a liminal space.

Keith Houston joins the conversation

1:58Ooh, ooh, wonderful. That's very of the moment. We've no Hedwig today, but replacing Hedwig is software engineer and author of a new book, Face with Tears of Joy, A Natural History of Emoji. It's Keith Houston. Hi, Keith. Hello, good morning, or good evening, as appropriate. We're going to find out all about the book, but first, tell us a little about you. Well, yeah, I'm a software engineer, and I've been doing it for about 10 years, and I got bored with software engineering, and I thought, I want to be a writer. So, I started writing, I started writing about unusual marks of punctuation back in about 2010 or so on.

2:35So, my first book was called Shady Characters. It was about these things, not actually really marks of punctuation, but things like ampersands, enterobangs, asterisks, daggers, that sort of thing. Pilcrows. Yeah, yeah. And so, this book really is kind of like a belated sequel to that first one. So, I've been writing on and off since then, and I think this is my fourth book. That makes sense, though, because there is a straight line from dingbats and octothorps and all the odd characters straight over to Emoji.

3:11So, it's a natural progression. Yeah, I guess rather than thinking of it as a sort of linear progression, I think there's a blender or a funnel. And at the bottom is Emoji, and lots of things go in, and certainly PyFont and dingbats and so on are one of those ingredients. But there's lots of other stuff that goes in as well. For sure. All right. Well, we're going to get into the history. Also, a big welcome to patrons. Thank you for being here.

Sharing top emoji in chat

3:35Just to get us started, why don't we try something fun? Everybody who wants to, put your five most common emoji in chat. Now, that's the ones where when you pull up your emoji panel, they're at the top. I'm going to do mine. Dude, although mine has kind of been messed with because I've been doing stuff for the show. But those are, hmm, I wonder what this says about me. The top one, the smiling face with scrunchy eyes, definitely the one that I use most often.

4:05What does that say about me? Don't know. Oh, Keith. Keith's got... Mine are all drug emoji because that was the last set of things I was writing out. Oh, okay. In preparing for the show. I was like, Keith, I didn't see you at my party. That's so strange.

4:23Oh, my God. For the audience who's listening, we've got mushroom, diamond, snow, maple leaf, which is a proxy for marijuana, and pill. Yeah, okay. Wow. But it's because of something you were doing. So, all right.

4:40Specifically for the show. No, I wasn't doing drugs. So, this doesn't end well. Yeah. We're just going to pivot away from that. Wow. I'm seeing... Ben, do you ever say anything? You've got a smoochy kiss. Yep. So, I've got the smoochy kiss with the love heart. I've got the face with what I describe as the anime sweat drop of slight embarrassment.

5:03I have the... Just the kind of like the big smiley face, but not with the teeth. You've been praised. That's the one. Yeah. You've just been praised. The naughty but happy devil. And then the like white sad and downcast face. And I think that last one is like, I use that a lot when I'm trying to convey an empathetic response to people and sort of try and get across to them something that they are revealing to me. And I'm like, I want you to know that this is not just like a, oh man, that's bad.

5:37But like a, oh man, that's bad. That's bad. And I feel bad because of that. Hmm. Louise says, never use them. Interesting. This is, can I say, where's, where's Louise in our little windows? Oh, there's, ah, um, Louise, if you suspect that you might be a rare person, you're not at all. I'm often struck by how many people across age groups are just total, um, emoji nopers and, and power to you. Hmm.

6:07I know that Ben, you are not a, a, you know, user, you're not a lover of the interface or of the keyboard. But here's the thing I would have told you for my entire life that I was just not really an emoji user. And then of late, I've been looking at the people that I text and I go, oh, hang on. I'm actually, I trend way up in most of the people that I speak to. So yeah, I don't, I think I might've had a not particularly accurate impression myself. That's very interesting.

6:38Okay. Well, before we go any farther, let's have a big welcome to our newest patrons.

Welcoming new patrons

6:44We've got a bunch of free ones. Ben, do you want to take this? Oh, am I looking in the run sheet, which I totally got open and the loud mechanical keyboard clacking that you can hear in the background is a totally unrelated matter. Everyone, anyway, as you were, uh, yes, I do. And they are, hi, new free patrons, Chloe A, Lydia D, Nicole, Johanna B. I'm going to guess with that one, uh, Guri family.

7:15Things are thoughts, Yana B.B., uh, Alexis T, Sophia SG. Who could that be? L.S. spelt E double L E capital E double S. Uh, Hannah and video consumer two, which I hope means there's a video consumer one. And now they must battle. I suppose that our new patron is the, the better version costs about as much, but like

7:46lots better. I've got to be honest. There's, this has not been my experience of sequels, Daniel, but product updates. That's look, look, having said that Terminator two judgment day. Oh boy. Howdy, what a film. So, you know, uh, let's, let's think that, um, that, that is what's happening here. I think so. All right, let's get into it.

Writing a natural history of emoji

8:06Keith, Ben has expressed a sentiment that I think is, is very interesting. And that is, gee, I never used to think that I do this, but I, now I find myself actually doing it. Like, I think a lot of us were, were overwhelmed by the novelty of emoji around 2015. And now it's sort of become this background baseline thing that we just kind of do without all the attention, but that doesn't mean it's faded. That doesn't mean it's disappeared. It just means it's part of our lives now. So I was curious about the timing of this book.

8:39Why now? I think precisely because emoji are now normalized to some extent. I mean, if you write books, you are always trying to figure out what you're going to be able to convince your agent to sell text. So there's a degree of, there's a degree of cynicism, right? You're sort of looking at what have I, what have I done in the past? What, what do I think that I can perhaps convince her to go for? And in actual fact, she didn't, she didn't want to go for it at all. Um, and I went away and wrote about 20,000 words on emoji anyway.

9:10And she said, oh, I wish you'd told me that you'd written all this. Now let's go and sell it. So, so we did. So yeah. And as I said earlier, it did feel a bit like a sequel. When I've been writing about unusual marks of punctuation, I was able to write about the history of writing and printing, um, and typography and everything that goes around that bookmaking and so on. And this let me write about, um, I guess, I guess the internet about computing and about the sort of the cultural stuff that goes around that, which is a nice, so it feels like a nice

9:42kind of segue to the context, you know, the context in which punctuation and typography grew up and the context in which emoji grew up. And in some ways, perhaps most interesting thing for me is that some of the people I was writing about in this book on emoji were still alive, which is not, which is not the case, um, for previous stuff, everyone was long dead. So I could kind of say whatever I wanted, but it's hard to be, it's hard to be mean about someone or perhaps to say exactly what you want to say about them. If they're still alive and they might see you for libel. True.

Interviews and corporate hurdles

10:11What about interviews? Did you do lots of that? Because the, you know, these players are there, but did you go live for anything? So I did. Yeah, I did. I think the best interview that I was able to do was with Mark Davis, who for a long time ran, uh, an organization called the Unicode Consortium. And this is a group of, um, engineers largely who come from companies like Google and Apple and Adobe and they pretty much control what emoji is and how it works. And the symbols you're going to be able to use on your phone or your computer.

10:44Um, and so I got, that was, that was great. I really enjoyed getting his view on things. He also turned out to be an incredibly nice person, which was, uh, a great surprise. Um, cause I think he's quite, I think he is a great person. I think he's done a lot of really good work in the field of sort of, you know, uh, language and scripts on computers. Um, but no, it turns out he's actually a nice guy as well. Uh, so I think of, so that, that was great. The flip side of things was that a lot of big companies like Google and Apple, they're

11:14huge and emoji are relatively speaking for them, tiny. They don't, they don't care about them, you know, that are rounding error in some sense. Right. Um, and also I think the culture of like the NDA and of intellectual property is really strong. So I tried and tried and tried and I could not get anyone currently working for Google or Apple to talk to me, which I was frustrated about. Um, I would have loved to have talked to Jennifer Daniel, who is the head of Unicode's Emboji subcommittee and they're a current Google employee as well. Um, but I just could not, could not get through to it at all, unfortunately.

11:45Um, I feel, I can feel the ghost of Hedwig, our absent co-host knocking at the door. Um, she's long had this sort of working theory that the committee at Unicode sort of, um, like you said before that, you know, Apple and Google, this is a rounding error for them. And yet clearly within the organizations, there is some acknowledgement that emoji represent a hugely, um, let's say outsized impact in terms of the way people interface with these

12:17devices. Um, so, so from Google's perspective or from Apple's perspective, it's like, oh fuck, do we have to talk about emoji again? But an acknowledgement of the fact that for a lot of people in a really significant way, it is a huge and significant component of the main way that they interact with these devices. Cause texting people for most people is still, let's say the nearly the primary use of at least a smartphone. Um, so I think, you know, the fact that you acknowledge that it's, it can't be that big

12:48a deal, but also at the same time, the fact that no one would talk to you, I don't know, to me that sniffs of like, but it's sort of a big deal and we'd kind of rather not talk about it because it's labor that we don't want to do, but we are doing and we will have to continue doing. Possibly, possibly. Um, you're absolutely right. It is. I mean, it is necessary. And perhaps being a bit hyperbolic when I say it's just a, it's just a rounding error. Google was one of the first companies, one of the first Western companies to really, uh, focus on emoji in a serious way.

13:19And that's because they wanted Gmail to be a success. They wanted to launch it in Japan and they realized they had to support emoji. And then Apple was the same. Um, so when Apple was looking at launching the iPhone again, uh, they were convinced. In fact, apparently Steve jobs was convinced by, oh, I'm going to get his name wrong. Um, uh, the head of soft bank, uh, which now is basically just a venture capital fund back then was, uh, among other things, um, a mobile network, uh, he convinced Steve jobs that they had to have emoji on the iPhone or it was going to flop.

13:51So both, both things were true. Google and Apple were both investing in emoji quite early on. And in fact, they took it to Unicode and they said, we really need to standardize this. So I think Unicode already had their, had their eye on it. And as I say, Unicode is basically these tech firms. So I think one of the ways that these companies acknowledge how important computerized language is, is they spend money. They spend tens of thousands of dollars a year to be members of this consortium and they put forward some of their best engineers.

14:21Uh, but I have to imagine they're all pretty busy people. So it may just, it may just have been the case. They could not spare the time. Um, but I, I, yeah, also if you are someone who works for Google on something, which is in financial terms, not particularly important, but perhaps in terms of the way that people interact with their devices, as you say, um, maybe they don't want to put a foot wrong. They don't want to say something that might get them in trouble later. So again, it could be as simple as that. I, I like to imagine what those meetings are like. And I think about just the most absurdist, like Kafka-esque style.

14:56Cause you've got to imagine people are sitting there being like, now, do we think this pixel on this tier adequately communicates the calm crying or do we think it's a little bit true? So I think there's also that, like no one wants to show how silly sausage making can be. And I think it would be silly more often than not, right? Like people would be struck by how ridiculous some of those conversations must be. Yeah, so there was, um, an episode in about 2016 or so that was called Emojigeddon, where

Standardizing emoji through Unicode

15:28there was apparently a kind of, um, an argument inside the Unicode consortium between people who were like, emoji are great. They're making us Unicode more relevant and they are, and they are making communication richer. And the other side of the other side was saying, this is bonkers. We're spending so much time discussing these utterly frivolous, uh, characters. Um, and so a couple of examples came about one was when there was a room full of these high power people from Google and Apple and Adobe and so on. And they were arguing over what sort of beans they should use for the bean emoji.

16:02Um, and they didn't know they, they couldn't agree. Um, and then there's another one, but there's one particular guy who had been a really, a really big contributor, especially when it came to sort of, um, older languages or languages that were falling out of use. And, um, he just was absolutely outraged that, um, somebody had proposed, I think it was a poop without eyes, because of course an emoji, there's a poop, there's a smiling poop with eyes. Someone had proposed a poop without eyes and he said, what next? Um, will we have a poop with dollar signs for eyes?

16:33Will we have a sad face poop in addition to the smiling poop? And he just, he was just incandescent that, um, Unicode had to care about this stuff. But I, the thing that I find really interesting is that they, they brought this upon themselves. Like they opened the door, they, these Japanese companies were using emoji and each one of them had their own vocabulary. So each one of them basically had their own list of emoji and each emoji was backed by a different number. This is how characters work on computers, right? You've got a number, you send that number from one computer to another, and they have to agree on what to show the user.

17:04Um, those are called character sets. So each of these different Japanese networks had a different emoji character set and they, they had to go through all of these gymnastics to make sure that when a symbol was sent from one phone on one network to a different phone on a different network, everyone saw the same thing or as close as possible. And it worked, but it was a bit clunky and Google and Apple did exactly the same thing when they first got involved. But then they dragged Unicode into it and Unicode said, yeah, let's do it. Let's standardize this. And they then became arbiters of the standard emoji set.

17:34And as soon as they did that, people started emailing them to say, wait, hang on, where's the female version of this emoji? Where is an emoji with a non-white skin tone? And so they were immediately set upon by people who rightly saw all the gaps in this. And then they did a thing which they don't normally do, which is they basically invented new characters to fill in the gaps. Unicode doesn't do this. Historically, it takes languages and characters that exist already and standardizes them. And now they were, they were minting these new things. And so again, they had not only put themselves in the firing line, they then made it worse

18:06by kind of not capitulating, that's the wrong way to think about it, but they changed what they did. They, they became a different organization and yeah, that's basically, yeah, they made themselves targets, um, in order to make emoji better, I guess. How dare they make things that represent a lot of people adequately? How very dare. You know, we've talked to, for example, Jane Solomon on the show, who was part of Unicode. Uh, she's a, a pal, friend of the show.

18:37And I kind of got the sense in 2017, 2018 that they were getting kind of tired, they were getting kind of tired of it. It's like, we don't want to do this anymore. We have enough. We have a taco emoji. Do we need a burrito emoji? Do we need five different kinds of beans? Do they still feel that way? Are you getting a sense of the temperature? So I think two things have happened. I think one is that just by the nature of time passing, people are a bit less exercised by emoji than they have been in the past.

19:08So the general temperature of the conversation, I think has, has gone down a bit, but they've also done a lot of work to fill in the gaps. So, you know, there was a huge update to do with skin tones. There was a huge update to do with male, female, gender neutral versions of most emoji where it mattered, I guess, in a sense, or that already had kind of gendered representations. There was a big update that added lots of emoji related to disabilities of one kind or another. So prosthetic limbs, hearing aids, that kind of thing, wheelchairs. One of the bigger ones recently was that, I guess this is more of a linguistic thing,

19:40but of course, lots of emoji are directional. They point, you know, they're very clearly traveling from one direction to another. And so they modified a whole pile of emoji so you could specify which way they face. So they have, they have tried chipping away. And this, this then, of course, makes it makes them fit better into different languages or makes them more flexible as well. So they've done a really good job in filling in most of the gaps. I think those two things, I think emoji has improved and people care about them a bit less. And so together, I think this is where we are. So emoji or Unicode rather, and now this is kind of, I think a bit of a holding pattern.

20:14They still have the emoji subcommittee. They still evaluate and add new emoji. But nowadays you're talking 10 or 15 new emoji a year rather than 100 or 200 to fill some massive glaring gap. So it's just the nature of things. I think it has slowed down.

Historical and platform context

20:28What I think might be really interesting when we're all dead is the level of linguistic sort of archaeology that's going to be necessary in the same way that we need to sort of walk kids or geez, not just kids, walk adults through Shakespeare and Shakespearean language where you go, listen, to understand this, this couplet or this stanza, you need to understand that at the time this thing happened and, you know, everyone thought this. And then when they said it's so on and so forth. Yeah. I have to imagine the iconographic nature of emoji.

21:01That's going to be even stronger, a distorting force as we move away. Or perhaps actually maybe I could be dead wrong and maybe it will be far stickier because we're talking at least about the core set, right, of the most used ones. Perhaps they will stay extremely sticky. You know, depending on when you are studying or from which period a tweet comes from, let's say, you know, is this before the aubergine became the standard emoji for penis or is it afterwards, right? So the meaning could vary substantially.

21:35Dongate. So it's, it's a really good point. And it's complicated, of course, because you are then expanding the set of emoji quite radically over the course of like five or 10 years. And so something that perhaps someone might have wanted to use wasn't available. So they chose something which approximated it. So perhaps you get higher resolution effectively in the language as emoji becomes richer. And then just the designs of certain emoji change for one reason or another. Not, not all that often and not always in a significant way, but in order to know exactly

22:10what someone meant, you almost have to know not just when they sent it, which may let you understand something about the meaning of a particular emoji, but you may have to know which platform they sent it on. You may have to have the actual physical pixels in front of you to know what they really meant by this. As I said, there aren't that many examples where it really, really matters, but it does. And has mattered at times. I have a really good example of having to know the context. There is one emoji that I get, but a lot of people won't. And I'm putting it in chat, dude, it's levitating guy.

22:40Oh, levitating guy in a suit. If you look at this, he's wearing a suit and he's got a sort of a trilby hat on. And I am positive that just about nobody understands where this comes from. This is a brand new one for me. I have never seen this emoji once before in my existence. In all the many years I've wandered the earth, this is fresh. Take a guess, everybody, in chat. Where does this come from? What is the context for this? Anybody got an idea? Sarah says, I did not know that one existed.

23:11Never seen it before. Justify. Is it hearkening to like old-timey magician stuff? Is that what we're working with here? No? Nope. Okay, Colin. Oh, X-Files, I like that. X-Files? Diego. Criss Angel? Is it Criss Angel, mind freak? It's Rude Boy. What's Rude Boy? To understand this, you have to understand the history of ska circa 1980, 1981. The Specials came out with their debut album. And also, like, the Selector and English Beat and Madness.

23:43And they had affected this style of, like, suits. They were, it came out of the British culture at the time. They were kind of the mod culture. And the two-tone bands, they were like, you know, black and white members playing together. They were explicitly anti-racist, but they were very big on suits. And so I think this is a Specials reference, a reference to the Specials, or that two-tone sort of ska style of the early 80s. Where does the levitation come in, Dan?

24:11Keith, help me. So it's specifically, yeah, specifically a drawing of the two-tone records label emblem or mascot. So this would appear on record labels. And I think that the person on those record labels was drawn levitating. But it's taken, it's a drawing of a very particular picture of it. I want to see, like, a member of, what, was it the Wailers or something like that? Is a really, there's a really, really, like, there's the picture of the person who became the emblem for this record label. And then the emblem for this record label, I think, was in Zapf Dingbats.

24:43Or something like that. And Zapf Dingbats was one of the first fonts that, as you mentioned earlier, kind of Py font or, you know, Dingbat font. One of the first fonts to be kind of ingested into Unicode. And then it was made an emoji at some point. So it's a really convoluted kind of life story for that particular emoji. And I have to imagine it's one of the least used and least well-known one at all. Which is a shame. But they also made a woman version of it. But they didn't know that whoever made it on a certain, not a certain platform, not the

25:13Unicode, but a certain platform, they thought, well, this is a guy in a business suit. The woman version is going to be a woman in a business suit. No, it's not. It's got to be. Oh, thank you, Diego, for posting the two-tone photo. The female counterpart is Rude Girl. Could someone please paste a photo of Rude Girl in the chat? She's playing records. She's listening. Diego's on the case. I can see him. He's going. He's going.

25:37Thank you. I've just run the levitation. I think it's because he's meant to be poor going. Okay. That's my guess. He would be jumping up and down and, but like doing a, like a strange, I was about to say, queer, a strange, oh, Rude Girl, I see. There she is. She's wearing that. She's got that sign on her shirt. Yes, I get it now. Like it's a, it is a part of the subculture. Cool. Thanks, Diego. You got it. All right. Actually, if we're talking about directionality and switching directionality, a lot of these

26:09emoji of people are walking right to left, I imagine because of Japanese reading conventions. I was thinking about the stock market up increasing and stock market down decreasing. I had this idea because the, the, the one for going up increasing is red and red is not usually a, a increasing color in my experience in stock market. Green is up and red is down. And I had this idea that it's because they were reading right to left and it was actually

26:44a down. And it wasn't an up and everybody was misunderstanding it. But I think I got that a little bit wrong. Do you know the story here, Keith? I'm not going to lie to you. I don't, um, it wouldn't surprise me if it is something culturally specific to Japan, uh, which is where so many emoji come from. And so there are a huge pile of emoji, which don't really make a great deal of sense, or perhaps have a huge one of use outside of Japan. But I am excited to hear what the answer is. The answer is that they actually, in Japan, do use red for increasing.

27:16So it's not mistaken, flipped, and it's actually decreasing and it's red. No, red is up and it is increasing and it's meant to be red from our perspective. Ah, Dita says, no, it's just that they associate red with up. I believe it was on the lateral thinking podcast. Very cool. Thank you, Dita.

27:37Whew. Okay. We are continuing. What's next on my, oh, let's talk about the new update.

New updates and changing designs

27:42The new update as of, uh, 16 August, 2026. This is the, uh, updates for emoji 17.0. And there's not very many of them. Like you say, Keith, there's, here we go. Distorted face. It's time to do your best distorted face impression. It looks like a face that's been inflated. I've got to say, sorry, Daniel. Distorted face is coming up the charts for me. I'm loving it. Yeah. It's a great one. I really like it. What would you use it for? It's like, I'm completely surprised or.

28:15No, I, I tend to use it for when clearly I just have more therapy to do about how others perceive me because it's like another one, like the sweat dollop, um, anime face. That is, is, is a way to communicate. Like I am acknowledging that I am a bit of a doofus right now. Okay. We've got fight cloud as seen in cartoons and comic books. Good to have. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Ballet dancer with five additional skin tone options. Yay. Fun.

28:46Orca, also known as a killer whale. Never, never hunt humans. They've never been recorded. I know, isn't that just the craziest thing? What's up there? Although, we should note, do hunt yachts, so, you know. Hmm. You wouldn't eat a yacht. And then the people get in the water and they're just like, oh, well, that's not, that's not the, the chewy nougat filling I was looking for. Hairy creature inspired by various global Bigfoot-esque cryptids. I noticed that Sasquatch is walking right to left, whereas canonically, according to the Patterson video, he's always walking left to right.

29:25Right. Hmm. Interesting that. Trombone. Oh, I know what I'm going to use that for. It's the sad trombone, right? Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah. Thank you. The landslide, which is something like you could be falling apart. You could be describing an election victory. Lots of choices for there. And treasure chest. Keith, in the graphic that you posted, I'm also seeing Apple Core. Didn't know that one was there. Yeah, that's, so this is a graphic put together by Emojipedia.

29:56If you don't know what Emojipedia is, you should. It is, effectively, the Wikipedia of Emoji is fantastic. And the guy who runs it, both the guy who founded it and the guy who runs it are both very nice. And the guy who runs it, his name is also Keith. Not me, it's a different Keith. But, you know, that's still a plus point. Do Emoji ever get dropped? Or is it like the Oxford English Dictionary when once they're in, they're in? Not really. Generally speaking, once something is in Unicode, then it stays in there. I think they have kind of deprecated one or two characters.

30:26But Emoji have, yeah, they haven't really, I don't think they've actually really dropped any of them. I suppose the big one, the big thing that tends to happen is that sometimes the appearance of an Emoji changes. Because it's just generally agreed that this is not quite right. And the big one, of course, is the pistol emoji. Which started off usually being a sort of realistic gun. And at some point, I think Apple decided to change it to a green water pistol. And gradually, everyone else did. And so we're now, to go back to what you said earlier, Ben, there's very definitely a pre and post water pistol emoji world.

31:03I think there were actually a few court cases where people were charged, at least partly on the strength of tweets or other messages directed at the police. And if they had lots of guns in them, then they looked a lot more sinister in 2010 than they did in 2016, say. So, as I was doing my research, all of these things were quite early on in sort of the phenomenon of Emoji in the West. I'm guessing because after a certain point, no one is using a green water pistol to threaten a cop anymore. At least in Emoji terms.

31:35This was a question from James. James says, rather famously, about 10 years ago, Apple changed their rendition of the gun emoji to a water pistol. Other emoji-friendly platforms followed suit, though not everyone. Do we know any long-term consequences, good or bad, or neutral to this change? What did we learn from how these decisions about how to portray an emoji gun were made? And are there other emojis where similar decisions were made with less fanfare? So the gun was obviously the most famous. Doesn't seem to have been a deterrent to gun violence.

32:06Lots of people in some countries are still killing each other or themselves at a propitious rate. So I guess there were a few confusing text messages, but that was about it. Yeah, basically. I mean, as I say, at least a couple of people, so there's the Emoji in the Courts is like a sort of sub-genre of Emoji fandom. There are at least a few people that write about how Emoji are perceived in evidence when they appear in the courtroom. And as I said, for at least a couple of cases, gun emoji were significant, and this was before the change.

32:41So either people are using them less, or perhaps we're just not reporting on them, perhaps. Emoji, gun emoji, water pistol emoji appear off and off so that it's not as remarkable anymore. I suspect that's not the case. I suspect that people are using it less, because it just looks slightly ridiculous. But yeah, just the idea of what did we learn, what did we learn from how those decisions were made? The core thing that Unicode does is it says something like, okay, the letter A is represented by this number, or the pistol emoji is represented by this number.

33:12It doesn't tell you precisely how to render it. It doesn't even tell you what a letter A should look like. The assumption is that everyone who's exchanging letter A's through their computer knows what a letter A should look like. I think that there's a really technical term, it's like abstract text content-bearing entity. They're not encoding letters, they're not encoding pictures, they're encoding abstract text content-bearing entities. And so when Unicode specifies an emoji, they tend to give it a relatively generic name, and they'll provide a kind of sample glyph.

33:43So they'll pay someone to come up with a few different ideas, or they're submitted. And they'll pick one, and that becomes the kind of rubber-stamped exemplar of that particular emoji. But there is absolutely no compulsion on the companies who actually then make the emoji for use on their platforms, the Googles, the Apples, the Adobes, and so on. There's no compulsion upon them at all to actually follow this. So the pistol changed because Apple thought it was a good idea to change it. And other vendors looked at it and thought, actually, yeah, let's just follow their example.

34:14Because perhaps they didn't want to be sued for someone threatening to shoot someone else with a realistic gun or something. I don't know. But I guess the thing that we learned is there are a number of different layers. There is the set of emoji that Unicode standardizes. There's the way they describe them. There's the way the platforms choose to interpret them. And then there are the ways that we choose to interpret them on top. So it's wheels than wheels here. There are many different ways you can look at an emoji and decide what it means. And there are many different people to be blamed or congratulated for creating it, designing it, using it.

34:48I remember also that the golf emoji, it was once a golf ball on Apple's platform. But then if you look at it now, it's just like a hole with a flag sticking out of it, like a little green mound with a flag. And that's the only other example I can think of of where it really has changed. Although, oh, now I think about it. The peach. The peach. Yeah, it temporarily became less like a bum. And lots of people are outraged by this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The hordes were at the gates.

35:20Why did you change the shapely peach? Yeah. Google did a similar thing. Google released a hamburger emoji with cheese below the hamburger. And it was the CEO of Google. He tweeted it too. And it sounded panicked. It sounded like, I can't believe we've dropped the ball on this one. And, you know, I'm guessing he shouted at someone. And then a few days later, the cheese was back on top of the hamburger. Oh, thank goodness. I love just because for people listening, I don't know how you'll be consuming this.

35:51But I, in my hostdom, get like a beautiful grid of all sorts of different people's faces as you were telling that story. And I saw more than one face as soon as you said the cheese was below the patty, just shaking their heads. Like just, just being like, this is not okay. Someone's never had a hamburger in their life. I think it might be that Sundar Pichai is so rich he doesn't have to make them himself. Just eat some. Yeah. Someone hands them to him. There were a couple of other interesting examples, which I'd actually forgotten about.

36:24One was the syringe emoji used to be filled with blood because the intention or the expectation was that it was going to be used for blood transfusions or blood donation. But then it was changed to just be an empty syringe, which of course is a bit more useful, a bit more generic and face with medical mask. So it's just a yellow emoji face used to be very serious, used to be just quite a neutral expression. But then during the COVID pandemic, apparently that was updated. So that a lot of the, a lot of the versions that have kind of smiling eyes or, you know, it's a, it's a visibly happy face, I guess, for obvious reasons, or at least to try and perhaps encourage people to wear masks.

37:00So that, I thought, I thought those two were quite interesting. One other thing has happened recently, which is a bit more technical or a bit more, um, I guess, related to the ins and outs of how emoji actually works. So emoji can have different skin tones or certain emoji, the ones that look human, that represent human body parts. You can choose yellow as a kind of neutral one, or you can choose light through to sort of five different light through to dark skin tones. Um, when it comes to family emoji, this is quite difficult because you might have, uh, two adults, two children, one adult, two children, you know, a lot, there are lots of different combinations.

37:35And the platform started trying to work at how you could have, um, families with different skin tones and it quickly becomes really complicated. You have this like combinatorial explosion of potential options. So now, um, I think Google was the first vendor to do this. They have just kind of silhouettes. So in the family emoji, there's no real option for skin tones anymore. They don't look like people. They look like kind of, you know, shadow puppets almost. So that to me is quite an interesting solution to, um, one of the problems, again, that emoji brought on itself to some extent.

38:05Sorry, Unicode brought on itself to some extent. Hmm. Let's go the opposite way. Um, we've talked about emoji that have changed, but Farrakat has a question. Farrakat is not in attendance at the moment. So she's where we are. Yeah. She's where we should be in bed.

Semantic shift and permanence

38:24What gives an emoji staying power? Are there emojis with meanings that haven't changed much? Now I want to pose this question here. Keith, do you have an answer? Not beyond the obvious ones, which I guess would be that there are certain emoji which represent really commonly understood concept heart. Like the heart will, I suspect, always be popular, right? It's a really simple, straightforward icon. Everyone knows what it means. Um, why would it not have staying power?

38:54One thing I find quite interesting. So the, the name of my book was, was, and is the most famous, not most famous, the most commonly used emoji in most places. So faced with tears of joy. The funny thing is to me, it actually looks a bit mocking. And, um, on Facebook, for example, a lot of, or lots of other platforms have these little reaction emojis. So you can pick from some subset of emoji to, to respond to a particular post or, you know, sentiment or whatever. And I always, it always gets my back up when people use the face with tears of joy on Facebook, because it looks like you're laughing at the person who's made the, the comment.

39:27And so there are many other emoji, which are smiley and happy and do not have that mocking connotation. So I guess for me, that's an odd one. That's an odd one to have become so popular. It seems plain to me that there are other better ways to express happiness for joy, or perhaps everyone is just mocking everyone else. Maybe, maybe that's, maybe that's the, maybe that's what it is, but no, I, I don't know if there's a particular roadmap to success for an emoji, other than the more generic and broadly understood the concept, the more likely it is to be used, I guess, and to, to, to keep that meaning.

40:02Ben, what do you think, which categories of emoji do you think would be the fastest moving to change? Um, or the slowest? I mean, so fastest moving would be, I think, bespoke unusual ones, right? Ones that are probably already getting used in wildly different ways. Like I cannot, for the life of me, Daniel, tell you how one is supposed to use your scat man, rude boy, scar dude. Um, I have no doubt that it is getting used, right? With enough data, there's always going to be some instances, but I imagine the semantic width of, of road boy would be.

40:40Tremendous, right? Um, for me, I think, like, I feel sort of weird, like there's a weird boomer just wanting to emerge out of me. I'm like, when will we talk about the good old smiley face? Like, it just never gets brought up anymore. Just your default, I don't use it, right? But like, what, just do people still use just the, like the first emoji of all the emoji if you don't, like, organize it by, you know, the default smiley face?

41:13Surely that, like the heart, would just be around forever. But it doesn't get used very much. I suppose we need to give a shout out to the original smiley, the one that actually came on posters and paper in the 1970s. Was it Harvey Ball, the artist who created that? Am I getting that name wrong? No, that's right. That's right. The funny thing, the thing that I guess I hadn't really appreciated was that that seemed to be so, so I'm sure everyone's familiar with it, just the boxed banner, yellow circle, two dots, smile. That seems to have inspired a whole pile of things which are almost like proto-emoji.

41:49So in programs like AOL Messenger and so on, there were lots of these proprietary messaging apps and Apple had iMessage. And so a lot of them actually had things which looked like emoji but were not, in the most technical sense, actually emoji because they were proprietary. They couldn't travel anywhere outside of that particular platform. But that seems to be why we have yellow emoji. The popularity of the yellow smiley face, which then inspired all these yellow smiley faces and these other apps, seems to be why emoji are by default yellow at this point.

42:23Okay, I was going to ask that, actually. I was going to say how, why did we, I was wondering if it was the Simpsons and animation as a tradition of like, we will make them unracial, but clearly still like yellow is white person because of the. Yeah. Oh, yeah. White supremacy, you know, culture and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. There's definitely, yeah, I guess Lego was the other thing I was looking at. Oh, of course. Lego minifigures. But no, it doesn't seem to be either of those. It just seems to be this hangover from Harvey Ball's original yellow smiley.

42:57I mean, all of the problems you have with. That is wild. Yeah. One guy. Sat down one day. So, I mean, you still, as you say, you still have all the problems with yellow emoji and then, oh, let's have skin tones. But as you say, yellow really is code for white. So, yeah, it must have been pretty frustrating. There was a suggestion. Unicode has got so much documentation on this. There's a suggestion in one of their documents, technical report 51, if you're interested, that says that link in the show notes, it says that we should use a kind of obviously non-human, obviously unnatural skin tone like yellow or purple, for example.

43:36But yellow has become the sort of the baked in default. And purple now, I think, has different, it kind of has different meanings for some emoji. So, like there are some faces which are depicted often as purple or sort of reddish. So, I think that ship is sail. I think emoji are yellow at this point. Okay. Well, let's get back to the question of what makes an emoji likely to go through semantic shift because there has been work on this. What I thought was, I thought of all the words in English that are the most polysamous. Which ones are they? And I thought, well, they're the most common ones.

44:07Which makes sense because, you know, Steve Levinson's work on ambiguity, we reuse efficient units. So, if something is used a lot, then it's going to get, A, used more and also be used in different ways. I thought if an emoji is really culturally specific, then we might pick it up and use it for something else like the Japanese onsen, which is a circle with red waves coming out of it. And it's really nice. It's like a hot spring that you can go swim in.

44:41Or we just won't use it. We just won't use it at all. So, also, if it seems kind of abstract, then it's kind of hard to know what to do with it. Like brown circle. What do I do with brown circle? That's not going to get picked up and it's not going to get, so potentially it could be used for lots of things, but effectively, no, because no one uses it. So, I found someone who'd done the work. This is work from Alexander Robertson of the University of Edinburgh and a team, published in the fourth international workshop on emoji understanding and applications in social media 2021.

45:14Yes, it's an entire conference on emoji. They measured semantic change in emoji use for 250 different emoji on Twitter by looking at patterns of words that appeared nearby. As we know, Ben, you will know an emoji by the company it keeps. Of course. If words are showing up, then that'll give a key to its meaning. For example, the frog emoji in 2012, 2013, the words that appeared nearby were something like lizard or bunny or frog. But by 2014, the nearby words were Kermit, snitch, low-key, NVM.

45:53And that's probably because of the none of my business meme, you know, Kermit drinking tea. I want to comment on a thing, but that's none of my business. And then by 2015, it had been repurposed for the Pepe meme, and it occurred near words that were slurs or terms of abuse. So, the patterns that they found in this research was they expected abstract emoji, like the brown circle, to undergo more change than concrete emoji. But in fact, they found the opposite.

46:25They found that concrete ones changed a lot more if it represented something. The ones that changed the most were backhand index finger pointing left, backhand index finger pointing right, finger pointing down, and closed fist pointing at you. And then there were a few that had dramatic change, like frog was one and skull was another. So, first of all, the ones that are used the most or the ones that represent specific things are probably going to do a lot of changing because we'll use them. And then a few just come out of nowhere and have a dramatic change that we just weren't expecting.

46:59All right. We are going to get to listener questions, especially Diego's questions, because I'm holding back on those. But we're going to be having those soon.

Related or Not word games

47:12But now I think it's time to play Related or Not. Related or Not. Who have we got this time? I thought we would go with David's theme, because I like it a bunch. Why don't we just make that the theme? All right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, no, no. If we're going to do it, can we do an obscure New Zealand song from an animation, Slice of Heaven by Dave Dobbin?

47:45Sure, Ben. Here we go. Here we go. Here we go. Here we go. Here we go. Here we go. Here we go. Related or Not. I never left the dance floor, you guys. I went disco real hard for just a second. All right. Now it's time for number one. And this one comes to us from Allison, who says, Dear Daniel Hedwig and Ben and Keith, I have another Related or Not for You orchard where you grow fruit.

48:25And hoard to accumulate and hide away. Thanks for all you do, Allison. Okay. Now, people are already starting to vote, but I think maybe hold off a little bit because we have to argue and fight about it. Yeah. Does anybody have any feelings? Feel free to unmute and I'll pin you and you can sort of give your views as well. This is your show too. Before anyone else jumps in, can I ask, Daniel, what is it called when a word, like a letter jumps a little bit down or up in a word?

49:01Right? Like how, what is it called if it used to be orchard and then it becomes orchard? Orchard to orchard? Yeah. Well, if the letter's twiddled, we call it metathesis. Okay. So you think, you think maybe the H might have a jumping H? I can't think of any other examples of jumping H. What I'm thinking here is maybe it was like a orchard, orchard kind of thing, but because that's clunky and it doesn't like roll off the tongue over time, it kind of like, you kind of glute into ord.

49:34H-dropping is a really common and well-known phenomenon. Yeah. Okay. So if it used to be orchard, then it would be very natural for it to turn into an orchard. And losing a D in the process as well. I don't know. That's where I was coming at it from. The D is still there. We've still got a D. Orchard to orchard. Yeah. This is spelling we're talking about.

49:56An orchard is more or less a fruit repository, is it not? A place where you hold on to fruit? No one conceives of agriculture that way, I don't think. No one looks at a field of wheat and goes, oh, what a handsome repository of wheat. No, but I'm going to from now on. Okay. Fair enough. I enjoy your repository of trees. Don't say you enjoy anyone's repository, please.

50:28Okay. I'm going with the opposite of what Ben thinks. So make up your mind. So you think, yeah, Ben? I'm going to go, yeah. I feel like just I'm vibing it. You know, I can feel those words in my mouth. They're nummy. They're close. I guess I'm no. So now, Keith, who do you like more?

50:46I think they're unrelated. Mostly on vibes, I'm afraid. He got the opposite vibe response to me. Keith likes me better. Okay. It's time to get those in. I better vote. There we go. Okay. Oh, yep. There we go. All right. I'm going to close off this poll. Oh, we've still got a few. One more. One more straggler. Oh, I think that's me.

51:12I think I'm counted. All right. I'm going to end this poll. Dude. Okay. It looks like 73% of us thought it was unrelated. 27% said related. You were swayed by my repository logic. Oh, gross. And the correct answer.

51:31No, it's not related. An orchard is a wart guard. Orchard, wart guard. A wart is like a vegetable. Wow. Are we talking like proper Middle English here? We are talking Old English, yes. Wart is a vegetable or a plant root. And guard was the garden or the yard. And that's how orchard is related to garden. It is a kind of garden. There we go. To hoard is just something else. It's from Old English hoard, which was Proto-Germanic.

52:03Hozdam, just a different word entirely. By the way, was anybody wondering about a horde of people? What do you think? Oh. Oh, I've never even... Do you know, I've just always long assumed that that is just the same word. And I'm only just now realizing, no, of course, they're spelled differently. There's no A, right? And there's an E on the end. This one is unrelated. It's just a West Turkic word. It just means camp or army or something like that, which is why the language Urdu is called

52:37Urdu because it means camp, the camp of the people where the people are. And the horde comes from that. That's very cool. Okay. Let's go on to our next one. And for this one, we need to go to Aaron. Oh, we've got a voice. We've got a voice. This one's from SpeakPipe. I love our SpeakPipers. Aaron says... I've got another related or not question for the team. This one is inspired by one of my brother's favorite phrases. He likes to say the bell of the ball.

53:08It got me thinking about those words and also their homophones. So I've got four words for you. They are bell, as in a young woman. Ball, as in a fancy party. Bell, as in something you ring to make noise. And ball, as in a spherical object. I love playing along when I listen to Related or Not. And I'm looking forward to hearing everyone's takes on this one. Goodbye. This is a good one, Aaron.

53:38Thanks, Aaron. Yeah, this is... You're nasty. You're a naughty boy. Well, let's see. I used Emoji in the poll here. So you've got a bunch of choices. You've got bell and bell are related. Ball and ball are related, but nothing else. And I think you only get one choice. So choose wisely. Then I have some combination of three of these are related. I lump that into... You win if it's any combination of three.

54:09And all four are related, and then none of them are related. Where do you want to start, Ben? What's your sense? Well, you've taken one option away. So it's not like bell and bell and ball and ball can both be related because you haven't given us that option because we've got to pick one.

54:29Which, that was my inclination. I could see a world where bell and bell are related and ball and ball are related, but they're not related to each other in any way. So, I think I'm going to go that bell and bell are related. No, I'm torn. This is hard. Actually, I'm going to say none. I'm going to go with none. Bells are very lovely, you know. Well, they're lovely objects. I don't think the two balls are related,

54:59but I got to say that bell and bell, giving me tremors, if I had to pick that any of them are related, I would say those are because bells make a pretty sound, don't they? Yeah, but we get bell from French. Oh, sorry, Keith. No, no, I was going to sort of half agree and half disagree. Yeah, so bell is obviously, you know, means beautiful in French.

55:19Bell, though. Yeah, okay, you're going to ring a bell. It's going to sound beautiful. But is that the main characteristic of a bell? Is that the thing which gives it its bellness? Is it not that it's a particular shape? It's made of metal to be, yeah, I don't know. I'm not sure that bell and bell are related. I feel it's more likely that ball and ball are related. Could bell be onomatopoeic as well? Like, you know, in a kind of a vague way, like when you, like a bell does kind of make it like a bell sound kind of thing.

55:52Everything's onomatopoeia. Well, I think that one more so than, like, at. Yeah, I don't think bell and bell are related. I think ball and ball might be, I'm not sure you can express why. Again, vibes.

56:09The vibes game. All right, everybody, get those in. The votes are pouring in. We've got a bunch of people. That's not dressing up from Sarah. A bell has the shape of a bell, of the balls, dress. Or maybe I'm just thinking of bell from Beauty and the Beast. It is bell-shaped, isn't it? They were. They were. They were. I feel like that's a funny coincidence, like that we've got these words for, like, young woman and beautiful and all that sort of thing, and like just for a while there we got real weird with lady fashion.

56:40We did. Okay, let's share those results. Okay, the most popular answer, none are related. Nobody said all four were related. Got a few people going for, in equal proportions, bell and bell related, ball and ball related, and some combination of the three. But only 13% for each of those. So most people said none are related. Let's start with bell and bell. I thought yes. The answer was no. The bell of the ball comes from Latin, bella, beautiful, or fair.

57:11From there it goes back to a Proto-Indo-European root, duennulo, odd. The bell that you ring, perhaps imitative, it is onomatopoeia. By golly, Ben, I'm giving you the point for that one. Yes, I will take my PhD in linguistics whenever you're ready. You don't get a PhD for a perhaps, because this is perhaps from an imitative Proto-Indo-European root, behel, to sound or to roar. And that is how bell is like the word to bellow.

57:42Ah! Good job, Ben. Fun. The OED points out this doesn't occur in other Germanic languages. Interesting. So no there. Now, what about ball and ball? The ball that you dance at and the ball that you throw. I said no. Answer no. The ball that you throw is a super old word, goes back to Proto-Germanic balus, which is just their word for that thing. But a ball that you dance at, as you've probably guessed, is related to baile, or yes,

58:13Anne says ball as in a dance is related to the word for dance as in ballerina or bailar in Spanish. Well done, Anne. Goes back. I wasn't expecting Greek to come in, though. Oh, yeah. Balezen, to dance or to jump about. And then apparently Latin borrowed it from that, ultimately from a totally different Proto-Indo-European root. Gwela to throw or to reach. And if you're asking about a diving bell, that one is related to a bell frequently applied to vessels bell-shaped. Yeah, that one.

58:43Yeah. Yep. All right. And then, last one. So just to be clear, I won because all four were unrelated. I just want to very clearly state that on the podcast. And I got it wrong. Because winning matters. Yes. Yep. Very good. One from Hugh, of Related or Not Jingle fame. Mm-hmm. Hugh says, Recently, when making a salad dressing containing Italian red wine vinegar and Spanish olive oil,

59:14I reflected on the words on the bottles of these ingredients. The vinegar was Aceto Divino Rosso. The oil was Acete de Oliva. I wondered how these two very different liquids could have names that look so similar in their respective languages. Do they have a common origin, perhaps meaning salad dressing ingredient? Did they get mixed up at some point, as they are, reluctantly, in my salad dressing? So we've got Italian Aceto, which is vinegar, and Spanish Acete, oil.

59:50Boy, they just seem really similar, don't they? I didn't even wait for you to finish, and I clicked Related, and I submitted. Bump. Yeah. I mean, look, for me, it's both kind of, I know vinegar is a fermented product, but they're both kind of like the juicy extractions of a product that's grown on shrubberies on the hills. Like, it's not a long bow to draw. Or that those two words would, like, maybe there was just one word for, and I'm going to get even grosser now, like, the fluid that you bottle when you smoosh up the thing that you grow.

1:00:30Yeah. Because I imagine vinegar was probably just, you put watered-down wine in a bottle with some mother from, like, another vinegar, and, like, Bob's your mom's brother kind of thing. And, you know, olive oil's kind of the same thing. You crush up a bunch of stuff, you put it in a bottle. Well, Dita says, I bet the Spanish one, aceite, is from Arabic for olive oil. Okay. Interesting. Ooh. And says, aceite seems so close to acid. I also put an option. I've already heard this one because I was wondering if this was a well-known one or if it wasn't.

1:01:02It wasn't to me, and I've been playing this game for quite a while. All right. What did I say? I said yes. They just seem really similar. I can totally see how they'd mix, even though in real life they don't. You just haven't shaken hard enough, Daniel. Oh, darn it. Get that emulsification going. Ooh, Keith, what do you reckon? I said no. I feel like the fundamental nature of vinegar is different to olive oil, and although they may cross in salads, perhaps they haven't always crossed in salads.

1:01:35So, yeah, I wasn't quite convinced. I have a new theory by way, as all great things in the world often are, by way of Diego. Diego has noted the acetuna, apologies for the pronunciation, Diego, is Spanish for olive. Now, do we think that acid, the root acid, is at play here? So, vinegar is obviously an acid. It is sour olives. When you nibble on them without doing a whole bunch of fucking random shit to them first, pretty awful to the tongue, pretty, like, bitter and acidic.

1:02:13I'm just saying, I'm just saying. I'm looking at acetuna. Is that just, like, the oily one? I'm not sure about etymology for this one, and my Spanish etymology isn't as good as it once was, but I see una on the end, which means one. And it's like, oh, yeah, that's the oily one. Yeah, we use that one for the oil. Okay, I'm going to close it off here. Yeah, lay it on us. Share the results. Looks like 64% of us said it was related, including me. 36% said not related, and the correct answer is not related.

1:02:49Oh, come on. I was so sure I was onto a winner with the acid thing there. Damn it. I know. So, Italian aceto comes from the Latin acetum, which means vinegar, and doesn't go back any farther than that. Spanish acete comes from Arabic. Zet. Thank you, Diego. Which means oil or lubrication. So, yeah, just... And Diego's posted etymology of acetuna there as well.

1:03:21So, everyone got fooled, including me, except for people who didn't. If you're in the 36%, give yourself a pat on the back. Thanks to you, Hugh, for that one. And thanks to David for our Related or Not jingle. You can send us your Related or Nots and jingles in all the usual ways. Email hello at becauselanguage.com. Okay, let's go back to emoji for a second. I've got a question, first of all. It's different on different platforms.

1:03:52Reddit never uses emoji. It's weird to find an emoji. I feel weird if I try to do it, even though I'm used to using them as, like, tone indicators, as a way of saying, hey, don't take this too seriously. But on Reddit, it just never happens. Whereas other places, it does. What do you reckon about the platform independence of emoji use? I think in all cases, it's context dependence or independence rather than platform specifically. So, apparently, I did a bit of searching on this.

1:04:24Apparently, when Reddit was founded, it was very text-heavy, populated largely by nerdy types. And they basically didn't like emoji or emoticons because they seemed unserious or frivolous. And so, that just seems to have persisted. And so, now there is some degree of ambient understanding that if you don't read it, you probably shouldn't be using emoji. But I couldn't have told you that beforehand. It's a bit like business emails. I get lots of messages in teams at work.

1:04:56So, you know, a kind of messaging thing, which use emoji. No one thinks twice. But I get very few emails. So, you know, it's largely the same people sending me messages, just slightly different tools or slightly different platforms in some sense, different contexts. And the emoji use is quite, quite different. So, there are so many inherent rules that you may or may not, I guess, have in mind when you're writing a message in a particular case. And I guess Redditors, yeah, have just told themselves they shouldn't be using emoji. Young pigs grunt as old pigs grunted before them.

1:05:28We seem to carry on these habits. We say, oh, I'm in this setting. I won't do this. And I imagine somebody would be a happy emoji user in a different setting. What do you think about the stink of frivolity? Has it dissipated? I remember doing interviews with people in, like, 10 years ago, 2015. And I said, you know, how do you feel about language? And one person that I talked to volunteered. He said, yeah, I feel like I use emoji too much.

1:06:00Whereas, I don't think anybody would say that today. I feel like it's just kind of accepted. Even in work emails, you can still find them. Or at least in React G, definitely. Yeah. I came across a new story recently in the medical imaging world. That's the kind of software that I write. And it turns out that emoji are starting to appear in medical notes, which I was initially surprised by. Although some are actually quite useful. There's one which is just like the kind of the red sign with a line through it,

1:06:30meaning don't do this thing. And that's clearly just being used in a way to say, do not give the patient this or be very aware that you must not do this thing with the patient. Like the maple leaf was popping up because this was an American data set. And of course, they're talking about Canadians, perhaps for billing reasons or whatever.

1:06:49That's really funny.

1:06:52I did wonder if it was wheat. I did wonder if they were talking about lots of patients who are high, but I think it was the Canadian factor. I guess the point is that perhaps emoji were once seen as frivolous, but now everyone understands what emoji are. Everyone understands that they exist and they know that they're just pictures of things. And in some cases, pictures of things are useful. And perhaps once you cross that Rubicon, perhaps once you use your first picture of a house when you're buying a house, suddenly emoji starts to look more reasonable in lots of different contexts.

1:07:24I saw a reply in the chat a little while ago. Someone had said that they sometimes just use a smiley face when they want to respond to something in a positive way without having necessarily a particular message. So they are genuinely useful. I think if anyone is like belittling emoji or is unnecessarily negative towards them, I think they're just, I think you're just a churl at this point. I think, yeah, I think I should say the stink of frivolity, I hope is gone. You mentioned that just dropping an emoji by itself.

1:07:55I find that's a really good way to close a bit. Like I have a back and forth bunch of messages, and then I'll just drop one in as a way of saying, I've seen this, I'm reacting to what you're saying. And I don't feel like starting a brand new turn. I don't have any more sort of content to add. I'm just going to go, and that tends to be a closer. So that's very useful that way as well. Yeah, no, I'd agree. Okay, I'm going to chuck it to Diego.

Listener questions on global usage

1:08:21Diego, are you ready for some, you've had four really good questions, and I want to talk about them all. Do you want to start off with number one? Because I've prepared something for each of these. Sure, absolutely. All right, hello, Keith. So my first question is, do speakers of any particular language or language variety use emojis more than others, like Japanese? Since that's, you know, kind of where they started? Anything like that? I did a bit of a survey, a short one.

1:08:54Daniel may have better answers than I do. I came across an interesting paper, which is from 2020. It was a study of tweets from 2016, and it was looking largely at European languages. So it looked at 30 languages in Europe. The top five uses of emoji within different languages were Welsh, Romanian, Czech, Basque, and Estonian. And I thought that was quite interesting, because, you know, Wales and the Basque country, even Estonia, relatively small countries with big, interesting neighbours

1:09:25who are quite different to them. And then the bottom five had Finnish, Korean, sorry, it wasn't just European languages, Finnish, Korean, Lithuanian, Portuguese, and Thai.

1:09:36And it seemed to vary quite a lot. There were lots of countries that were right next to each other in geographical terms that used emoji, you know, twice as often or twice as frequently, for example. There didn't seem to be a massive pattern in there. So I don't know. I don't know if you can generalise. I don't know if you can say that, you know, users of the Latin alphabet use it more than, say, Japanese or Korean or Chinese. But I'm sure that there are, I'm sure there's work out there where people have come up with that. One other thing I found was a different paper

1:10:06for those looking at Turkish and English speakers. I guess that's quite addressing because they both use the Latin alphabet, but they're quite different languages. Or they now use the Latin alphabet, although once they didn't. It turns out that Turkish speakers were more likely to use an emoji or to use at least one of them. But then when English speakers did use emoji, they used more. So like English had a longer tail. And so there are all of these little subtleties in how people use them that I think are probably right for a study.

1:10:38I don't think I've got any big headline things that I can tell you. At least I didn't find any. Maybe Daniel can add some better stuff. I found another one. Those were good. This is work from Mayank Kedrawal of UCLA and a team published in 2021 in online social networks and media. It's called An Empirical Study of Emoji Usage on Twitter in Linguistic and National Contexts. Open access. You can check it out. It'll be on our show notes for this episode. The top five countries, and these will be slightly different because they were looking at different things and measuring them in different ways. But the top five for them

1:11:08were USA, Brazil, Japan, UK, and Spain among 30 countries. And then there was the lowest five, Venezuela, Portugal, Uruguay, Egypt, and Netherlands. Also, some interesting results from SwiftKey, which was a predictive keyboard app back in the day. They did some analysis on their data. They found that Australians use double the amount of alcohol-themed emoji, including cheers, beer, wine, and cocktail. USA was the same, but for meat.

1:11:40For some reason, meat emoji were extremely American-leaning. One study that I thought was really interesting and that I cited in the book was from 2016. And it looked at emoji use within countries and it categorized those countries according to how equally power was distributed. So how equal a society was, how individual it was versus sort of collectivist, whether it prized long-term relationships over short-term relationships, kind of face-saving, risk-taking over risk avoidance, and self-indulgent versus more restrained countries.

1:12:14And I found that the more unequally power was distributed, the more negative emoji were used in that country. But just for everything else, so a country that was more individualistic, that prized long-term relationships, that was all about risk-taking, and about self-indulgence, all of those countries tended to use more, or there was a correlation, they used more positive emoji. And I seem to remember that Australia was called out as being one of the countries that used, that used things like alcohol and gambling emoji much more than in many other contexts.

1:12:45Okay. Gambling is our guns.

1:12:49I think drinking might also be your guns. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Possibly. Drinking is everyone's guns, though. Gambling is very specifically our guns. All right, Diego, what else? So have you come across any language populations that just don't use any emojis at all? Anywhere in the world or any languages where people just haven't started using them? People with no phones.

1:13:15Well, yeah, that's what I wrote down as I thought about this. I get the feeling that if you have the ability to access them, then you will eventually start using them. And again, I would come back to that example of emoji and medical records. Like, you know, half of the time, I deal with radiology a lot, and the doctors there are dictating. But I bet if they could write emoji, they would use emoji. And so I suspect the answer is no. I suspect that there is some level of emoji penetration in just about any population that has access to them.

1:13:48Again, others may do different. Perhaps there are really strong cultural or even religious objections to them in some cases. I don't know. Sounds good. How about, what's next? Because I like this one. Yes. I was curious to know if everybody just uses the same term emoji to refer to these things, or if you've come across other terminology for it, like vastly different words that don't sound anything like emoji. I have not. So I'm hoping that Daniel has. Well, it looks like the term emoji is used everywhere.

1:14:20And if they don't use that term, they use something like emoticon, which is funny because those two words are not etymologically related. No. Emoji is picture character, a emoji in Japanese, whereas emoticon is, of course, emotion or relates to emotion. And there are different things, you know, not just in etymological terms, but in technical terms. An emoticon is, for example, a colon followed by a parenthesis, whereas an emoji is an actual picture in amongst your text.

1:14:51Funny that they get mixed up like that. Initially, it was a big thing. It was. But I found that speakers of the Chinese languages don't, or they might use the term emoji, but they're more likely to use something like 表情符号, which means expression symbol. And I just thought it was funny that the Chinese could just not let the Japanese have that one. Just didn't want to.

1:15:15That's true. Actually, can I ask Daniel, this is very tangential. Is Chinese standardized usage language, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, is it more resistant to adopting, you know, because Japanese famously loves, you know, bringing in the English words and other words and like just sort of incorporating them. Chinese less so? Don't know. Don't have any figures on acceptance. No, I would only have to guess.

1:15:49Sorry, I just read Aristismo's comment and it's really good. Surely the Académie Française must have some alternative to emoji. Yeah, they must. And it would be super long and convoluted as well. And also, like everything else that the Académie does, everyone would just ignore it.

1:16:09All right. And then finally, Diego. Yes, are there any surprising trends regarding who's using emojis more, like younger population versus older or urban population versus rural, things like that? So the trends that I found when I'm looking for this, there seemed to be general agreement that women use emojis slightly more than men, which I don't know if that's surprising or not, but it's a thing. One paper I read said that African emoji users

1:16:43tended to use them more frequently, just posting a link here, tended to use them more frequently than Hispanic or Asian users and then European users were lower down again.

1:16:53But it varied. Again, Daniel mentioned a couple of other studies and I think it depends what you're looking for. So perhaps you won't necessarily find anything particularly interesting. One thing I did see in a different paper that I'll post just now, is that age didn't seem to be a particularly strong predictor. So older people use emoji, again, depending on context, more or less as much as younger people and people in the middle. So I was somewhat surprised by that.

1:17:20By the way, Keith Houston wins the award for best guest for posting show notes items in the chat while he's talking about them. This makes my job so much easier.

1:17:33I noticed that the folks behind World Emoji Day, they don't list their sources, but they list these stats. 86% of emoji users on Twitter are 24 or younger. This was probably old data. 57% of emoji users on Twitter are women, but they don't give sources. I'm posting it anyway just for interest. We do know that younger people are at the head of the change and I'm going to post some work from Te Shirli. This is a paper from November 2025 called Emoji Semantic Change and Generational Variation

1:18:04in Digital Communication. They studied five emoji, the skull, loudly crying emoji, clown emoji, melting face emoji, and nail polish emoji. Now, those are five emoji that have really shown a lot of difference and generations will use them differently. And what they found was that, number one, youth-led innovation, Gen Z consistently reinterprets emojis metaphorically, ironically, or hyperbolically.

1:18:34Like the nails are something like, that's none of my business or something metaphorical like that. The clown is like, you're clowning yourself or I'm just kidding or I'm clowning myself. Skull emoji is, I'm dead. That's too funny. That's hilarious. Whereas Gen X and baby boomers frequently selected literal interpretations or indicated uncertainty. Their responses show weaker acquisition of metaphorical or mimetic uses. So the melting face,

1:19:06a Gen Z would say, that's enough for me. I'm just about done here. Whereas a Gen X or a boomer would say, oh, they must mean that they're hot or something like that. Something literal. And then millennials, Ben, this one's for you. Millennials as transitional adopters. Millennials usually display hybrid behavior, partially adopting newer meanings while retaining older ones. Their interpretations bridge conservative and innovative semantic norms. So that's an interesting look at cross-generational

1:19:37semantic change. Once again, us millennials are being the bridge generation. We're boundary spanners. We span the boundary. You just want to kind of be cool, but you're not quite able to pull it off. Yeah, I think it's a bit that, but I also think, and I would write as a millennial, I would be like, no, Daniel, it's so much more than that. I expect that I grew up pushing buttons on a telephone,

1:20:07right? And I remember a time without internet and I remember a time with like, really, really, really, really slow internet. So like, there is a thing of like, and I'm not the person to come up with this. I think a few different stand-ups have done this as a bit, but like, I was there when some of the old codes were written, right? Of the, of the contemporary digital age. But I also remember when the, the before time, when parents were just like, wildly neglectful of their children and would just

1:20:38allow them what now has been called free-range parenting, but I think back and I'm like, I'm not so sure. Just no parenting. Yeah, just, just, just out of sight, out of mind, mostly. Or at least, maybe that's just my neglectful upbringing. Who knows?

1:20:58Well, Diego, how did we do? You did great. You answered all, all the questions and I, I learned a lot. Thank you. Thank you for asking them. The book is Faced with Tears of Joy, A Natural History of Emoji. It's out now from W.W. Norton. We've been talking to the author, Keith Houston. Keith, thank you so much for coming on the show and hanging out and talking with us about this stuff. It's been really fascinating. No, not at all. Thank you very much. How can people find you? So, I, I've got a blog at shadycharacters.co.uk

1:21:28which is now, I think, about 16 or 17 years old, which is insane in internet terms. It's a geriatric blog. But go there. That's where I still write and you can follow my books there. Geriatric blog. What a great name. I've got a few of those. Okay, but thanks to Keith Houston. Thanks to everybody who gave us questions and insights and your emoji. Thanks to Speech Docs for transcribing all the words. And again, patrons, you're the best. Thank you so much

1:21:59for coming on and helping us. You, the real MB piece. And Ben, can't get enough of your love, baby. Jump in. Do the reads. Do the reads. Okay. Yeah, yeah, getting to it. Don't go away, people. There's more. Because Language Lovers, we would love you to do just a couple of things for us. You can follow us. We are at becauselanguage.com on Blue Sky and at becauselangpod just about everywhere else. You can send us ideas, news and words like all of the tremendous human beings who I am currently

1:22:30staring at the faces and avatars of in this live Zoom recording. As we heard today, SpeakPipe is a tremendous, wonderful little thing and now people are starting to use it more so we can hear your voices in the show. It's so good so leave us a SpeakPipe and of course as always you can do the very best thing you can do with any podcast and tell a mate you're like I know these nerds they talk about language you might not like the nerdy language talk you should check them out. I would do it just like that. You can go word for word.

1:23:00I think that's fine. That's a good idea. You can also become a patron like the great people who are with us now. You get stuff depending on your level. Live shows, bonus episodes, mail outs, shout outs, Discord access. Boy, Discord has a range of characters. The emoji-splosion has gone nuts. I can now pick stuff for any of my communities and react with them which is great. If you're a patron we get your support and that helps us to keep the regular episodes free for everybody, convinces our partners that this is a worthwhile endeavor even at 5am,

1:23:31and makes sure that we can just cover our costs and keep things going. A big shout out to our patrons at the supporter level. So because this is the emoji show, well, I decided to take the list of all the emoji in the world that we have, all 1819 emoji, and I decided to see which ones are closest to the names of our supporters. So, here we go. Oh dear. Stan Swan. Can everyone see that okay?

1:24:02Daniel, are you going to do every single patron this way? Heather. Oh no. Feather. Now we're, these are in order of how little I had to change. Remember, this is just the ones. These are ones. These are ones. This is the edit distance how many letters you had to add, remove, or twiddle. This is completely dumb and ridiculous, Daniel. Continue. Ben, this one's you. Never mind. It's great. I love it. Because I did well. There you go. You got a pen. Woohoo! It's a very nice pen. Manu,

1:24:33man. Oh, also because some names mapped onto the same emoji, I decided to make it so that once an emoji got used, it was then disqualified for everybody else and it had to go to a different one. Helen, hole. I'm sorry, Helen, you got a hole.

1:24:53There were others. Larry, fairy. Now Helen's like, Larry got a cool fairy and I just got a hole. Rene, bone. There you go, Rene. One for you. Nigel, tiger. Keith, kite. Oh, but that's not you, Keith Houston. You're later. Yeah. Diego, a dango. Does anybody know what dango is? No. I didn't either, but it's in there. Isn't it some sort of Japanese ice cream treat?

1:25:24Yes, it's a tasty Japanese ice cream treat. So one of them is rose flavor and one of them is matcha flavor and I don't know what the white one is, just white flavor. So there you go. That one's for you, buddy. Mayonnaise. Mayonnaise ice cream. Yeah, it would be too. Roger, badger. Oh, that's a nice one. Fiona, lion. Rush, you got a ram. Hmm, look at that. Laura, Libra. Laura, are you a Libra? No idea. Bet they are.

1:25:54Luis, lungs, and a couple of healthy looking lungs they are too. Tony, you got a tent. You would have been bone, but that was disqualified, so you get a tent. James, camel. We're still in the twos. Amy, baby. There we go. Aldo, bald. A very strange take on that. You know, only a quarter of the head. We can't show the entire head. That's an odd one. Yeah. There are technical reasons, but we don't need to go into them.

1:26:26Wait, what? No, please. I think we do need to go into them. Some emoji are not just one symbol, there are multiple symbols, and some of them can be modified by different hair types, so like bald hair, curly hair,

1:26:41oh, ginger hair, I think. Oh no, is that just a different one? Anyway, there are different hair types, and so this is a modifier emoji. It's not a single emoji. You would never actually see it on its own. You'd only ever see it in combination with something else, and then it changes the appearance of the emojis match. That's so cool. Does it use zero with joiners? It might indeed use a zwidge, yes. A zwidge. So you could have a bald volcano or a bald poop. Okay. It's limited.

1:27:10Only if somebody chooses to make that specific character. All right. Yeah. Lucy, duck. We're still on the twos. Lance, a canoe. Lissa, kiss. And we all know that the best way to kiss somebody is to just not face them at all, just both face forward, and then try to move your lips far enough to make contact. Very successful and very romantic. Andy B, candy. Now we're in the threes. Nasrin, you got yarn. That's a very nice skein of yarn,

1:27:40I would say. Joanna, koala, but only the dismembered head of the koala. Look at its wee dead eyes.

1:27:51Nikolai, bikini, for someone whose body parts are very, very close to each other. Aisha, eyes. Steel, a seal. Steel always gets the best ones. Tony. Kevin, brain. Kathy, cat. That was, that should have been foreseen. Amir, alien. I was going to be alien, but I got something else. Otim, sorry, let's do it together. Otim. Otim.

1:28:21Otter.

1:28:23Very nice. Look at him. It's got his little abalone there. Wolfdog. Now I had to wonder about this one. Was it going to be a wolf or was it going to be a dog? Oh yeah. Well, it's a wolf. Yeah, okay. Mignon is bison. Oh, that's a good one. She would have been lion, but you can't have the same one twice. Zachary, ear. That was popular as well. Martha, mouth. Why Martha? That's a, that's a sexy mouth. I've not,

1:28:53I've not noticed how overtly sexual the mouth is. I, I think I might need to put one into higher rotation. Quite frankly, that's slightly parted lips. Whoa. Martha, I didn't realize. Becky, boy, and Daryl, girl. Yay. They came up together. Both the distance of three. Elias, Elias elf, and me, man elf. Matt, man elf, Daniel. That's.

1:29:24Man elf. That is tremendous. Oh, I'm changing your name in my phone. Man elf. Now. The man elf. That is happening. That's my, that's my avatar for the foreseeable future. And I don't even like Tolkien. Hedvig, wedding. Amanita, panda. Whitney, chicken, somehow. But now, now as the names get longer, they get more entertaining and the distances get farther. Chris L, child, Christopher, printer.

1:29:56Daniel got a man elf and I got a printer. It's a very nice printer. It's very serviceable. It was a very nice man elf. Aria flame. Briefcase. Aria flame would have been aeroplane, except that in the Australian version, it's aeroplane, A-E-R-O, which was a farther distance. So briefcase it was. Colleen, goblin. Hmm. The Tengu mask. Interesting history. Ignacio, snail. John K, cook, Yavod,

1:30:27guard, rosemary, rosette. Isn't that lovely? Sydney, aye.

1:30:36Farrowcat. Parachute. How about that? Grammarian. Grapes.

1:30:43Uh, now we're on Lord Mortis. We have to say Lord Mortis in that way. Lord Mortis. Locomotive. Now I can picture him riding on that thing with the little hat. Kenny Archer. Man teacher, which could be a teacher who is a man or it could be someone who teaches men. I don't know. Curse you English and your ambiguous head modifier relations. Molly D, honeybee. That's your avatar from now on. John Troy.

1:31:14No entry. Sam. Sam. Sam. Skull. That was, that took five. That was a long one. Okay. You're going to love this one. Faux Frenchie. Fax machine. Yeah. I mean, it's crazy. It's crazy that that's still a, um, an emoji, but sure. It keeps Germany running. Keith Houston.

1:31:39Eject button.

1:31:42That's fun. I like that a lot. Which I'm surprised you haven't utilized in this podcast up to this point. Sonic Snedgehog. Service dog. Probably the best. Meredith Musing. Person pouting. Meredith, I don't know why I never used your full name before, but this was fun.

1:32:03Linguistic chaos. Disguised face. And finally, Andy from Logophilius. The best one. Angry face. Angry face with horns. With the horns. And you, you, yeah, you went full send, Daniel. You, you did the whole list. Good for you. I did a good job on that one. It took a long time. Thanks to all of our patrons. And thanks to Ben Ainsley for sharing a screenshot of Daniel Midgley's new contact card in his phone.

1:32:35Which I think should, I would think that all of the people currently in attendance would think, that needs to go in the show notes as well, Daniel, because you are now Man-Elf Midgley. Man-Elf Midgley. How's the alliteration? Okay. All right. Elf is my middle name. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. Our theme music was written and performed by Drew Krapulianov, who also performs with Ryan Bino and Didion's Bible. Thank you so very much for listening. We'll catch you next time. Because language. Pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew,

1:33:06pew, pew, Oh, I'm going to go switch to gallery mode. Does anybody want to give us a pew? Pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, You've got to do the pews. Everyone pew. Pew it furiously. Don't worry, this won't go on. I'm so tired. I don't know what I'm doing. Why didn't I just yell at a bunch of nice people?

1:33:26Yeah. Can I have some emoji there? There we go. Emoji cues. Hey, that's the way. That's what we like to see. And it's the new squirt gun emoji. Thank you everyone for being here. This was so much fun. Thank you all humans for putting up with our silly nonsense. I'm going back to bed. I'm going back to bed. I'm going back to bed. I'm going back to bed.