Over the past few years, the definition of texting has further evolved with the introduction of something that has both loosened the medium’s restrictions and presented new ones. Down at the bottom of the list of new features promised by iOS5, the iPhone operating system that débuted last year, was something at which only a true text-artist would rejoice: the iPhone keyboard would now come automatically equipped with Emoji, a line of tiny Japanese pictographs that can be deployed like letters. Anyone using an older model iPhone or Android already had the option of texting with Emojis, but to do so required downloading an app, and then manually adding the “language” to the keyboard. Now access was effortless. Last month, with the introduction of the iPhone 5 and iOS6, texters got another treat: a set of brand new Emojis, hundreds of them. As one aficionado recently put it, via text: “It’s like you’re a speaker of some primitive Japanese picture language with only three hundred some odd words and your vocabulary just DOUBLED.”
It’s hard to explain the appeal of this primitive language, but perhaps just as hard not to succumb to it. Emoji (the word is an anglicization of Japanese characters that translate literally to “picture letter”) takes the idea of the emoticon—the smiley face :), the sad face :(, the winking face ;), the heart <3—and brings it to its logical conclusion: full color, detail, a world of options. For starters, the classic emoticon faces are turned right-side up, now rendered as bright yellow orbs, and their expressions, no longer subjected to the limits of standard punctuation marks, run the gamut of cartoonish emotion: grin with eyes closed; grin with eyes open; wide-eyed, red-cheeked embarrassment; eyes-lowered, red-cheeked embarrassment; gritted teeth; hearts for eyes; puckered lips; wink with a smile; wink with tongue out; features crumpled in misery; eyebrows furrowed in anger. There are eleven Emoji hearts, including one that appears to be pulsating and one with an arrow shot through it. (...)
Most Emojis are universally understood—even the ones you can’t imagine finding use for. (My personal favorites in that category comprise what I like to think of as the Lost Toys: nearly obsolete technological equipment it seems hilarious to reference at all, let alone in a text, including a fax machine, a floppy disk, a VHS tape, a pager, a CD, and a camcorder.) Others, however, are distinctly Japanese. There is an array of actual Japanese characters, a line of Japanese foods (a plate of curry with rice, a bowl of ramen, a bento box, tuna sushi, onigri, shrimp tempura, a dish of shaved ice, a bottle of sake), a handful of Japanese trinkets, and a yellow face wearing a surgical mask, with sad eyes. And then there are the Emojis that seem to just be lost in translation: a pyramid of excrement with eyes and a grin; a stack of dollar bills with wings; the tip of a fountain pen in front of a padlock; a pair of hands held up, palms open, beneath a line of blue triangles; a building with the letters BK on it (not signifying, presumably, Brooklyn); the number 18 circled and crossed with a diagonal line. (...)
According to Business Wire, more than seventy per cent of young women in Japan use “Emoji-enabled services” (Emoji is also available for some e-mail platforms, including Gmail) and the Emoji market there exceeds three hundred million U.S. dollars. So what does one do with Emojis? Although just scrolling through them provides a little thrill, figuring out how to use them is the exciting part. Personally, I like to pepper them throughout my texts, using them to complement a word, feeling, or concept when appropriate: “Had you already left when the undercover cops broke up the party?! [policeman]” “[airplane] fly safe [pill] [sleeping Zs]”.
Sometimes I send them on their own. I recently texted a friend mired in grad school a tiny green turtle, just to let her know I was thinking of her; she responded with a poodle, and then a yellow face blowing a kiss. Even Vladimir Nabokov, arguably unparallelled in his mastery of the English language, acknowledged that sometimes nothing but an emoticon will quite do: when, in 1969, the New YorkTimes asked him how he ranked himself among other writers, he replied, “I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile—some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket, which I would now like to trace in reply to your question.”
by Hanah Goldfield, New Yorker | Read more:
Illustration: Maximilian Bode
