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Comment by kieckerjan | Hacker News Reader

Tangential, but I can hardly be the only one who thinks emoji are stuck in a preteen mindset, with poop being the naughtiest thing expressible. Which serious language has no words for sex, drugs and the tragedies that haunt a human life?

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Yes, this is because emojis are created by committee. The Unicode committee to be precise.

If instead emojis could be drawn and inserted in messages and maintained and shared through emoji-libraries by actual users, then we would get an actual naturally evolving language. Much more interesting.

As a classic example of a naturally evolved emoticon language, on the SomethingAwful forums anyone could (and still can) buy an emoticon for $30. Here they all are: https://forums.somethingawful.com/misc.php?action=showsmilie...

Surprised there are so few.

Conditions for buying one for $30 are here:

https://store.somethingawful.com/products/smilie.php

Many many hilarious but inappropriate smilies have died as part of the SomethingAwful revamp. I'm still not clicking on that link at work...

I should confess that I absolutely added :ohdear: :colbert: :v: :argh: :welp: and a fair few others to Slack at work.

:shobon:

That's probably also why we don't have a real gun emoji (or it's rendered as a water pistol in many places). Although guns aren't the nicest invention, they are real and sometimes need to be represented graphically.

The pistol emoji originally looked like a real gun. I think only Windows had a fake looking gun (more of a ray gun than a water pistol) initially.

https://web.archive.org/web/20150625033351/https://unicode.o...

The change to a water pistol started with Apple in 2016, and then other companies followed:

https://blog.emojipedia.org/apple-and-the-gun-emoji/

This was so important for (american) vendors and the (more or less american) committee that they even retroactively changed the standard from "pistol" to "water pistol", in the light of (american) gun violence.

Msn messenger had custom emoticons in 2003. Me and my friends had our own little vernacular of custom emojis. And then microsoft forced everyone onto skype. I keep being amazed how chat hasn’t really improved in decades, only churned.

It is nothing short of a disgrace that we can't even personalize the fonts in whatsapp and similar clients.

Right, I have a hard time believing that a emoji for e.g. "love hotel" would be able to become a emoji nowadays, if it had not been grandfathered in.

It's possible in Slack. Every Slack workspace has its set of own emoji. Some of them are unique, some are almost universal.

party parrot might be the most common across the Slacks I've been into

Is it even a real company if they don't have the party parrot?

On Telegram, one can make one’s own sticker packs by simply uploading a bunch of images. I see a lot of sticker packs on the theme of “my fursona expressing various emotions”, and it is pretty common to see one person have a new idea for an emotion or interaction, which is rapidly copied into other people’s sets when they have the resources available to create or commission a new drawing.

Furries being furries, a lot of these are pretty explicit, and pretty inventive in their explicitness.

Yup! In fact, getting more stickers has been on my list for a while now.

They're used for everything, but they both: * Capture an emotion with more granularity than available emojis * Capture an intended physical action whether sfw or nsfw (owo) * Invoke everything that comes with seeing your character "come to life" as well as assisting you in embodying that character (like a fursuit does)

This is one of the most important features of telegram; without it, the furries wouldn't have become the core userbase during the early years.

... or programs could just display images instead of continuously approximating them (which is why unicode is so bloated and unreasonable about)

This is literally Telegram stickers.

Are these stickers inline? It's not a language if you can't make a sentence.

Are glyphs going from left to right the general rule now? It's not a language otherwise? Pretty sure there are a tonne of pre-Western languages that buck this trend.

People tend to use stickers in amongst regular text in a way that's more "I could write out how I feel/what I'm going to do to you/what you're going to do to me, but instead I will _show_ you".

Take the regular language in between stickers as the grammar/conjunctions as conjunctions are to regular language.

No, they are not. But almost no one uses emoji to compose sentences anyway.

I've noticed that emoji and stickers are absolutely not used in the same way.

People often combine multiple emoji to express certain things that can't be expressed with a single emoji (and too difficult to find/create a sticker for).

Stickers are also much less subtle and more in your face, and therefore not appreciated in the same way.

although i’ve noticed mostly human emojis can be used consciously. the others (tree, objects, etc) are suggested when you type a word but almost never selected to replace words in a sentence. So i don’t know who really uses them.

Not full sentences perhaps but there is a reason the Egyptians used hieroglyphics, and a reason we say a picture is worth a thousand words, so adding some to a text message is very common

I had to make my girlfriend stop doing that because I couldn't decipher what she was saying, it was like +30% extra information I thought was decoration :D

Also, on Tinder bios emoji soup is a thing.

Almost no one, besides some country with the biggest population on earth. ;-)

Btw:

http://www.emojidick.com/

Most messengers have these stickers too

They are glyphes. You don't expect the roman letters to individually represent all concepts.

In the same way, emoji are glyphes and just symbols. We will attach meaning to each symbol, combinations of symbols and context, and will express whatever we want with it.

Just like people say "this is the shit", and "this is shit", and it says litterally the opposite of each other.

E.G: we already use the eggplant to talk about sex.

And disappointingly, all emojis used for sexual inuendo are excluded from the emoji kitchen.

The sexual inuendo combos may probably be some of the most used combos other than the official ones.

The prudishness really is disappointing.

The gun emoji was converted to a squirt gun en masse because #oh-mai-gawd-guns-evil. Yet a pretty decent chunk of our entertainment in shows, movies, and games include (gasp!) guns that resemble over the top usage against other human beings, which is fine because it's fake and people are smart enough to draw the distinctions.

Emojis though? Nah, not possible. Too triggering.

I'll be sure to ask Google and Apple to ban the Peach emoji when I accidentally bite into the pit and need tooth repair.

It's not preteen, it's corporate.

Heh:

https://blog.prototypr.io/are-we-designing-for-children-an-a...

And if I might add: why do we need multiple colors for a heart or multiple hearts? One wasn't enough? Are we going to cover all the drinks know by mankind or one generic "alcoholic" drink was okay? What about flowers? Do we need to cover them all or a generic "flower" pictogram is enough?

Most of those "weird" emojis were grandfathered in from the Japanese standard

Why even multi color human? Nothing more racist than making a point about color anytime you use an emoji.

I exclusively use the purple heart where my online handle has the word Purple in it. Then others use it too. It has aided expression, however marginally.

One Love Rasta

Edit: unfortunately there is no support for emojis on HN. Just imagine a red, a golden, and a green heart there.

It's not a language, you're not supposed to write Shakespeare with emojis.

In technical parlance, human language is Turing-complete, emojis are a limited scripting language to expand our expressive ability.

Nobody is replacing Objective C in macOS with Applescript.

I guess an emoji could be proposed for grief, that is a tricky question in itself. There is a system to go through to add new emojis, it does seem to be very hard work now.

https://unicode.org/emoji/proposals.html

I was going to say something as intense as grief is too much for emojis, but it would mark the maturing of the glyphs.

There are already a few that touch on grief, but at the end of the day they're still little cartoons, which naturally make them more lighthearted.

What a weird comment - there's multiple drug emojis (syringe, pill, whisky, beer, cocktail, cigarette, sake), tragedies (gravestone, sad faces, sick faces, hospital, ambulance, bandage, casket, skull and crossbones). There's even a middle finger.

The sex ones are peach, eggplant, squirt, bed, volcano, pointing finger hand followed by ok hand, lips, and love hotel.

Oh but there is

>Sex

Aubergine and peach, various "horny" faces

>Drugs

The leaf, the clouded face, the syringe

I'm not a big user of emoji outside of Slack reactions, but I do enjoy that many emoji have become euphemistic of things like sex, drugs and tragedy, e.g. the syringe, the aubergine, the herb leaf etc.

If i understand correctly, this is developed by Google and shipped with their keyboard. They aren't going to start suggesting custom lewd stickers to people.

As a furry, the answer is: telegram stickers. Oh boy is there a sticker for every conceivable sfw and nsfw feeling or action. For example (sfw): https://t.me/nowandlaters/789

Well there is the "love hotel" https://emojipedia.org/love-hotel/

But otherwise I agree.

Emoji inherited that from the Japanese though, from eons past. Something like that would never get in today.

Drugs, <needle>, <pills> Death has four, Sex is a lingo. <Eggplant>, <splash>

(I don't know why I emojis to post)

Creating pictographs of ideas isn't easy.

Like Newspeak in euphemism then, but retaining ambiguity.

Plus a committee that can retroactively change what people have said.

Hindi has words but not commonly used and understood slang for many of these concepts.

Well, there’s always U+0130B8.

Again, trying to eliminate grief by decree. And then we wonder why everyone is depressed. If negative things are so undesirable, why do we represent them in the arts?

Looking at the Emoji list (in general, not from the link above) I can see plenty of emojis displaying concern, sadness, grief and other "negative" emotions.

No jealousy or loneliness

How would you depict that with a pair of eyes and a mouth?

I've always thought U+01F97A FACE WITH PLEADING EYES does an okay job of representing loneliness. If you were to tint U+01F616 CONFOUNDED FACE green, it would be good for jealousy, perhaps.

You are thinking about particular renderings of emojis. The actual definition for U+01F97A FACE WITH PLEADING EYES does not represent loneliness at all and you can't expect that whatever shows up for whoever you're talking to does. But people do keep adding these expectations to emojis that are not encoded in unicode at all so while emojis do give the impression of being a standardized encoding we're really back to vendor-specific codepages.

I meannnnnn if you know you know :)

and yet it's extremely commonplace to represent sex or drugs using existing emojies

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