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

I can see some point to doing that, but when I wanted to do it recently on another thread I couldn’t figure out how to do it.

Topic Actions, Select Posts, then I think it’s Move to New Topic. Ross, if you don’t feel like doing it I’ll jump on it later.

I haven’t really been here, or read in depth, so would appreciate you splitting it @RogerBW

I don’t see anything with the name Topic Actions under either the magnifying glass, the lines of texts, or my initial. Where would I look for it if I wanted it, starting here?

There’s nothing like a calm, neutral thread title :laughing:

I think you missed your calling as a tabloid headline writer @RogerBW!

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Assuming you’re on the desktop interface: on the right side, above the pale blue scrollbar, a mod account should show a grey-on-grey spanner [wrench] icon. That’s topic actions (the hovertext should come up when you mouse over it). From there you can choose posts, and once you’ve selected some you can move them to a new topic, join them onto an existing topic (this is often very confusing), etc.

I find emoji mildly amusing but not something I have to understand. Mind you I have just posted elsewhere:

:alien::policeman::sos::phone:

and at the very least the hover-text should give it away…

I have great respect for anyone who can work usefully in the 300-word vocabulary they’re allowed. I don’t like what they do with the skill, but…

Thanks! I don’t think I ever perceived that wrench icon before. Or the pale blue scrollbar, for that matter. Have they been there all along?

In the US, these are different things.

Golf Clap: sarcastic clap used to mock, usually, a friend

Slow Clap: the end of terrible movies where the protagonist confronts a jerk and tells them off in a public place- followed by a crowd staring in silence before starting a slow clap (that eventually turns into applause)

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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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