NEW YORK – When it comes to emojis, the future is very, very ... Face with Tears of Joy.
If you don’t know what that means then you: a) aren’t a 14-year-old girl. b) love to hate those tiny pictures. Or c) are nowhere near a smartphone or online chat.
Otherwise, here in 2016, it’s all emojis, all the time. And Face with Tears of Joy, by the way, is a bright yellow happy face with a classic, toothy grin as tears fall.
The Face was chosen by Oxford Dictionaries as its 2015 “word” of the year, based on its popularity and reflecting the rise of emojis to help charitable causes, promote businesses and generally assist oh-so-many-more of us in further expressing ourselves on social media and in texts.
The Beyhive knows. The collective fan base of Beyoncé recently spammed Amber Rose with bumblebee emojis when they sensed a diss of their queen.
Taco Bell also knows. Emoji overseers approved a taco character last year after a yearlong campaign by the company to get one up and running, rewarding users of said taco on Twitter with gifts of free photos, GIFs and other virtual playthings to celebrate.
While there’s now a strict definition of emojis as images created through standardized computer coding that works across platforms, they have many, many popular cousins by way of “stickers,” which are images without the wonky back end. Kimojis, the invention of Kim Kardashian, aren’t technically emojis, for instance, at least in the eyes of purists.
In tech lore, the great emoji explosion has a grandfather in Japan and his name is Shigetaka Kurita. He was inspired in the 1990s by manja and kanji when he and others on a team working to develop what is considered the world’s first widespread mobile Internet platform came up with some rudimentary characters. They were working a good decade before Apple developed a set of emojis for the first iPhones.
Emojis are either loads of fun or the bane of your existence. One thing is sure: There’s no worry they’ll become a “language” in and of themselves. While everybody from Coca-Cola to the Kitten Bowl have come up with little pictographs to whip up interest in themselves, emojis exist mainly to nuance the words regular folk type, standing in for tone of voice, facial expressions and physical gestures – extended middle finger emoji added recently.
“Words aren’t dead. Long live the emoji, long live the word,” laughed Gretchen McCulloch, a Toronto linguist who, like some others in her field, is studying emojis and other aspects of Internet language.
