Emojis: scourge on society, or a threat to all we hold dear?

Aaaah! Gotcha. Yes, the golf clap is definitely the same!

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I am convinced now I am never again making an emoji joke…NOT!!!

If the same sentence with a smiley at the end, or a sweaty face, does not give you more context… well, I don’t know what will.

Anyway, having regrettably fed the beast, at least I am glad the debate is open and in the best of spirits.

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:sparkles:

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I think we have to be. Have you heard our accent? It’s the best joke we have.

Just to :man_playing_handball: :fuelpump: on the :fire:, I’m trying to decide which emoji best represents NZ humor. :neutral_face: or :confused:

Edit: ok, emojis are awful.

For those who don't get it:

The emojis are stand ins for throw, fuel and fire, making it “throw fuel on the fire…” But in undecipherable vague pixels.

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:fries:

I have a sudden urge to try to construct my own set of board game based puzzles like the rebus ones people solved over here but using only emoji.

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Is that supposed to be a bucket of popcorn? Are you sitting down to enjoy the show?

Don’t do it. It’s a trap. There’s less than you think and nothing’s where you think it should be.

If you do, share? I like puzzles.

It appears to be a sleeve of french frieschips

Yes, popcorn.

or maybe popcourn

:popcorn:

Apparently popcorn is yellow and comes in red-and-white-striped packets.

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Honestly I’d sooner think that was a bucket of chicken from KFC

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The US is a big place. In my experience, golf clap is a polite, quiet clap–whether or not this is sarcastic varies wildly, but it is usually intended with some manner or humor. The humor need not be in the insincerity of the applause specifically, especially if the clap is fast-paced.

Slow clapping in my experience usually refers to just the slow clapping, not the eventual acceleration thereof. It is always done for emphasis and usually to take center stage in a situation, whereas golf claps (whether sarcastic or sincere) are usually not done the steal the show. A slow clap can be appreciative, but it is just as likely to be sardonic and mocking–the mocking-ness of it is usually proportional to how slow and loud the clap is.

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There’s no use looking for universal meaning in emoji. There’s honestly less use looking for universal meaning in many words than dictionaries and language classes let on early in the process–words tend to be more stable and specific across space and time than emoji, but emoji are in good company. Facial expressions, gestures, phrases, slang–there are lots of other aspects of communication that share the inconsistency and ambiguity across time and space that emoji have.

There are broad patterns, dialects, idiosyncrasies, and errors in emoji usages just as in word usage and in the other more flexible communicative particles mentioned above. Every forum or discord server has it’s own dialect of in-jokes, memes, emoji, and of word usage just as offline communities have their own systems of idiomatic expression. These things tend to be quite contagious in enclosed spaces. Resenting that is a bit like wandering into Rome and complaining about all these damn fools speaking Italian. What do all these sounds mean? It’s madness! One can always request information in a common tongue. If something is unclear, ask. :slight_smile:

We also probably all misunderstand each other much more often than we realize when using “proper” words, we just like to assume that doesn’t happen for convenience sake until its obvious enough that it can’t be ignored. :wink:

If I were to propose a style guide for emoji usage, I wouldn’t go about attempting to codify what individual emoji mean (though there’s no harm in doing that as long as one doesn’t try to assert it the wrong way around as a source of truth). Rather it’d include a couple of best practices, chiefly: please consider the final product whenever possible. There’s only so much you can do across certain device mismatches, but consider how the aesthetic of emoji in your current context changes their most basic meaning even setting aside differences in local community dialect.

Sidebar about emoji styles

I was quite disappointed when google took one of my most used expressions:
image
and converted it to this less characterful version:
image

In general I find more generic emoji sets really frustrating. The less character there is in the illustration, the less reason there is to have an illustration as opposed to simple text-based emoji. You can get a lot more flavor, range and nuance out of a non-standard emoji set with an idiosyncratic art style and it’s not as if we’re all going to agree on what the things mean anyway. The second image above seems more generically “astonished”, but that’s not a mood I find myself wanting to express often, whereas that face was a routine part of my vocabulary and put into an image something I can’t express in text and can only sort of express with my own face and sound effects.

As someone over a decade into a long distance relationship and with my all my closest friends spread across the country, I find the capacity for nuance and flavor more important than superficial ease of understanding. It’s those moments of intimate, unspoken under standing that are hardest to experience in text–video is lovely where possible, but this sort of thing is indispensable to me in saying the unsayable, however light and frivolous that unsayable thing may be in isolation.

That face is a mood I found really useful. While on the one hand that is a mood likely less useful to quite a few users, a more idiosyncratic set is going to have more hits of that nature–many users will have one or more emoji in the set that encapsulate something complicated and personal that words do not. We can all type “wow” quite quickly.

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It’s amazing how effectively people can communicate with incredibly limited vocabulary. There is clear difference in international dialect even in the use of car horns. Considering that the “speaker”'s only options are duration and frequency of pressing the steering wheel, that’s remarkable. No wonder emojis are so expressive, and also so easy to misunderstand.

I don’t know of an emoji that operates as much like a shibboleth as ‘lol’ does in the world of tlas, but such shibboleths probably exist.

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Well, everyone who saw a trailer for The Emoji Movie knows about :poop: and I suspect that it is very over among people who think of things as over.

(I thought the trailer was very clear, but apparently it didn’t do its job, and some people actually bought tickets for the film.)

I believe there was something like that on the old forum, though I’ve forgotten who did it.

I don’t think one could represent the names directly, but more the ethos of the game. So perhaps something like

:man_farmer::sheep::cow::corn::money_with_wings:

(it’s very handy to have hover text…)

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Speaking of display differences for emojis across platforms, I have a friend who likes to make little faces made up of different emojis, like this:

:eye::wavy_dash::eye:

However, when she does this on Facebook messenger, they come out horrifying thanks to the Facebook eye emoji looking like this:

Under a cut to spare those who don't wish to see it

image

Which led to me creating this ultimate horror:

The Facebook beholder

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I enjoyed this short tribute to the versatility of :+1: from a couple of years ago:

Obviously, sometimes it’s just ‘yes’ or ‘OK’, but very often it does something you can’t easily do with just a few words - it can say, for instance; “I have received your message, I don’t necessarily agree with it, but this conversation is now ended and I’m grateful for your participation’.

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I do wonder how Internet users in South America, parts of Africa and the Middle East interpret the ubiquitous thumbs up, given that it’s not really a gesture you want to be using there.

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Agricola surely?

:male_detective: :policeman: :policeman: :policewoman: :policewoman: :uk::mag: :footprints: :question: :question:

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Scotland Yard?

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On one hand, yes, I agree with that priority. But on the other hand, being linguistically oriented, I’ve worked very hard to develop the skill of saying such things in words, or at least of using words with nuance and flavor, both in speech and in writing, even though words, too, are fallible, as this very discussion illustrates. And on the gripping hand, when I first encountered emoticons, probably a couple of decades ago, I found it really hard to figure out what facial expression they were meant to represent, or what that signified, and the problem really isn’t helped much by the tiny blobs that emoji mostly come across as here; it’s like the old Peanuts movies where adult speech is represented by a “wanh wanh wanh” sound effect. (I’m not very good at expressions on actual faces, either.)

I have no wish to tell any of you not to use emoji. I’m just letting you know that if you’re trying to communicate with me specifically, via emoji, I probably won’t understand you, and if you use emoji together with words I’ll likely not even look at the emoji in the first place. This is my personal difficulty and if it makes it not worth your while to interact with me you’re under no obligation to do so.

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