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Comment by codingdave | Hacker News Reader

> What kind of writing system allows people to change my words after I've written them?

Any kind of writing system allows this. Translation changes the words, and can change meaning. People can mis-quote. And yes, over time, meanings of words change, as do the cultural contexts from which they came. None of this is unique to emojis.

The truth is that all communication has at least two parties, and there is never a guarantee that the receiver will get the message as intended. Even if you do craft "pixel-perfect" emojis, people still can (and likely will) mis-understand the nuances of your intended message.

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There is a difference between organic shifts in language use over time and forced shifts made by an influential few motivated by some misguided urge to improve society by limiting the range of thought.

Think of the word "gun". The image that entered your mind just now was not a water gun. It was a weapon, the kind of device the gun emoji used to depict and now no longer does.

The people forcing this kind of change want you to associate the concept of a gun with a water gun or other toy, and they think that by changing your though pattern this way, they'll make society safer.

This is terrifying and totalitarian idea. Once you buy into the idea that you can force a change to the language to achieve your desired social aims, there's no intrusion into private life that you will be unable to justify.

> The people forcing this kind of change want you to associate the concept of a gun with a water gun or other toy, and they think that by changing your though pattern this way, they'll make society safer.

Very Orwellian. In 1984, that was the point of Newspeak - to make it impossible to express certain ideas.

Yes, but as the author of the article argues, the emoji icon of an eggplant has been culturally interpreted with a different semiotic meaning. The same could very well happen with the emoji icon of a watergun (despite the emoji’s semiotic shift), indicating a symbolic duplexity in the meaning of a handgun.

I.e., if you choose to mean a handgun when writing a watergun, the emoji’s meaning can change.

This very much reminds me of the CCP banning words online and then people coming up with new “synonyms” to bypass the ban, then that gets banned and new phrases words take its place and it goes on...

Yeah, such a tragedy for all those native emoji speakers

> native emoji speakers

Anyone born in the last dozen or so years.

See also the recent change to the Google salad emoji to remove eggs and make the salad 'vegan friendly'. https://www.cnet.com/news/google-removes-egg-from-salad-emoj...

When "gay" changed from "happy" to "homosexual", it (1) took many years (starting over a hundred years ago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay) and (2) happened as hundreds of millions of English speakers came to a consensus -- or at least an overwhelming acceptance -- about the word.

When "pistol" changed to mean "toy gun", it (1) happened in two years and (2) was decided by an oligarchy of actors (and not even the Unicode Consortium oligarchy).

Can you spot the difference?

Slang can change rapidly based on current events.

It doesn't change very often due to top-down orders, though...

It didn't in this case either, it changed because a group of private platform vendors decided they agreed with the rationale one of the other vendors had for changing something.

So not very far away from an oligarchy as paulddraper pointed out?

Why do you not consider that to be "top down orders"? Sure, the orders came from a few execs at a few companies, rather than from the president, but it still looks top-down to me. Specifically it looks top-down in contrast to slang changing rapidly due to current events (which was the original context), which involves a bunch of people having a new reference point, and choosing to use that in their speech.

I'm not sure time-to-change is all that relevant; it didn't take 100 years for the eggplant emoji to come to mean "penis"

It also didn't come to mean that at the behest of those in control of the glyphs. It came to mean that in an organic, even memetic fashion. That's the difference.

Not a valid comparison. The eggplant emoji might mean something other than eggplant, but if you change it to a watermelon you can’t even recognize it as the same symbol, let alone guess at the intended meaning. This is why it’s disturbing: it actively obscures interpretation.

Granted, I’m assuming historians will use the emoji set at time of writing, but that’s not trivially available.

Meaning changes over time, but the words you've written usually dont. They might be interpreted differently in the future, but when you said gun, you said the word gun.

In the case of emoji, we're aceepting the idea that when I said gun, I in fact did not say gun, I said water gun. You can interpret the water gun as gun or water gun, but really I never said gun

Thing is, if you said gun in 2015 to owners of a Windows Phone, they heard laser pistol. Emojis were never an universal standard, just a broad approximation.

Even so, at least you have the chance to be aware of that; if I typed this sentence using emoji, its impossible to know what it will appear as in 5 years, without seeing into the future.

this comment could be interpreted as a threat 50 years down the line, by the change of meaning over time, but any sane person understanding that history and context matter, with knowledge of how it would be interpreted today, would realize its not. But if we applied the same acceptance to text as we do with emoji, the whole thing could be changed such that in both this time, and 50 years from now, it would be interpreted as a threat. The same context argument could apply, but I'm also sure defenders of the change would also not see the need to maintain a log of how things have been changed, as I doubt they care about emoji changes today.

The words themselves aren't simply appearing differently; they're changing, right from under my feet. The only defense is that (afaik) the unicode assortium has not changed yet changed the naming for it (ie CRYING FACE EMOJI), but since no one in practice refers to that definition, its not a useful defense.

Thus, emoji in their current form are highly inappropriate as a medium of communication, except in the very limited use case of short-lived, impermanent, and same-implementation communications.

But since this constraint is not the intention of the unicode consortium, and this is not the intention of the groups/font-creators that support emoji, and this is not a limitation that the general user expects, then this is a very poor design.

Emojis have been accepted as intentionally corruptible communications, but no party involved actually realizes the implications of it. We don't change ascii (ignoring the latter 127 characters, which are open to any interpretation) except by accident and by intentional non-meaningful changes (changing fonts does not change the characters themselves, just their aesthetics [except I guess wingbats]), and everyone would throw a fit if they did, because the notion is absurd

Sure, but all of those are different than an admin at hacker news doing an

    UPDATE posts SET text="I hate brown people" WHERE post_id=17560983

to make you look like a racist (or whatever they wanted to alter your comment to look as though you had written it). That type of editing doesn't naturally occur and is more like the type of changed meaning we're talking about here.

This. Look at how words like "infringe", "unreasonable", and "speedy" in the US constitution have become significantly less meaningful over time.

Continuing your point...

Fonts and rendering and apps will change just like compilers and source and runtimes. aka bit rot.

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Want to preserve your output? Then print to PDF with embedded fonts. Or use screenshots.

Want to be able to recreate your output? Then treat your content like devs treat their software.

I used to write prepress and print manufacturing software. I also did a tour of duty as our tech writer. Our team's entire publishing workflow got a lot more sane when I treated it like any other dev task.

Make dependencies explicit, use source control, pin down versions of apps, drivers, fonts, OSes, etc (aka colophon).

Our "build servers" even had VMware images, containing our desktop publishing apps, used to automate PostScript, PDF, and web output.

(This is long before Chef & Ansible, CI/CD, etc. Kids today have no idea how good they got it.)

>Any kind of writing system allows this.

The meaning of the words will change over time, but not the words themselves. So someone who reads it will know what the words written actually were, and just have to lookup any differences in meeting between when the words were written and now.

Imagine for a second if we took Shakespeare and rewrote it with modern day English, and then made the claim the new version is the original Shakespeare... I think we would see the problem with that. But that is what happened with emoji. It isn't that people look back, see as collections of pixels, and realize now those pixels mean water gun while in the past they meant firearm. When they look back, they see water gun.

> The meaning of the words will change over time, but not the words themselves.

1. orthography also changes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s)

2. the purpose of words is to communicate concepts, if the meaning of the word changes the word itself has changed, reducing a word to its mere orthography is nonsensical

Would you see any issues with Apple changing the orthography of the character f from "f" to "g"?

guck yes!

>orthography also changes

Not of things already written down. The long S written in the Constitution is still there. It has not changed, and there would be outrage for anyone to go and change it. Changing the emoji from one meaning to another would be like changing the encoding of utf-8 so that a now means e and e means a, meaning that and and end flips in every utf-8 encoded file that is viewed.

That's a completely different problem. Both translation and interpretation does not change the original text, only your interpretation of it. Messing with Unicode glyphs kinda does (well not if you go back to U+CODES, but nobody consumes texts this way).

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