Hannah Jane Parkinson reports for the Guardian on something that has become vital to modern communication:
There have been plenty of, shall we say, unusual or eye-raising legal decisions around technology. […] But the thing that caught my eye last week was a Canadian court decision that ruled a thumbs-up emoji is legally permissible as contract assent. There are more examples of emojis finding their way before the bench. In 2014, a Michigan court tried a defamation case involving a stuck-out tongue emoticon (rendered as :-p). In Ohio, a judgment in a harassment case queried what, exactly, the rat emoji meant in that context.
This is because emojis – as many unfortunates have discovered (often gen X parents, but that I, a millennial in her early 30s, am increasingly, devastatingly, discovering) – do not always have clearcut meanings. This is true of all language of course – and emojis are a type of language, despite what the likes of John Humphrys et al have sneered in the past. A thumbs-up emoji, to take the example from the Canadian case, can, just as in offline life, be used sarcastically. (This was noted in the court ruling.) In some regions such as in the Middle East a thumbs-up can be offensive. […]
Particularly interesting is the way in which emojis are approved, which is by an industry body called the Unicode Consortium; I like to imagine its members as a bunch of normal-looking suits sitting around a table – except they all have giant yellow heads and love hearts for eyes. The emoji-accepting process is not simple – it’s basically the emoji equivalent of winning a place at Oxbridge. This is why the subjects of the “two dancing girls” emoji look so pleased. It can take two years for submitted emoji proposals to be accepted and completed, and there is often a public clamour for new additions. […]
The language we use in tech, then, is just as important as that coming from our mouths, or our hands, or any other form of IRL communication. And, as with those forms, a lot can be said about a person’s age or social demographic in their use of emojis. Gen Z thinks the crying-with-laughter emoji terribly uncool, and more often uses the skull emoji (as in, “I’m dead”, when finding something amusing or out there). I’m not sure if we’ve moved on from using the painting nails emoji as a sort of jovial smugness to signify one’s own achievement or moment of aptitude, but I hope not. I think, by now, we all know what the aubergine emoji means – and it isn’t an aubergine. […]
Never got around to reading Moby-Dick? Well, it’s since been translated into emoji. As have the lyrics to a number of pop songs. To not know the latest emoji use or etiquette has almost become a modern form of illiteracy.
I remember when I first became aware of emoji, I sneered; now I use them frequently and shamelessly in my messages. So thanks, Trevor, for the link, and happy Emoji Day to all!
I’d like emoji more if they, like the rest of Unicode, weren’t so Western-centric, particularly when it comes to everyday objects and foods. It’s a huge thing to fulfill, but one can still think of asking.
It’s interesting how “Generation [letter]” became the preliminary terms for age cohorts that have not yet received real names, like the preliminary names given to new synthetic elments (e. g. “unnilennium” for “meitnerium”). I always disliked “Generation X”—in part because when the name started to appear, different people were using to refer to very different groups, with the starting dates up to fifteen years apart. However, it was at least a real name, which attempted to convey something, although not something I necessarily agreed with. On the other hand, I disliked the coining of “Generation Y” even more when I first came across it. (I refused to use that term in a review in The Tech, on one occasion when I was substituting for the editor-in-chief.) Now that people are talking about “Z,” I wonder how long it will be before that cohort gets a real name of their own. And what will be the placeholder name for the kids currently being born in North America? “Generation α”?
I agree, I’ve always found those Generation X/Y/Z names artificial and silly; I can never remember what they refer to.
Now fully replaced by millennials in English.
Already happened; they’re Zoomers in mocking analogy to their arch-enemies, the Boomers.
Already is.
Whatever their names, these “generations” are bullshit. The idea that I have more in common with someone born 18 years before me than with someone born the year after me is obviously false. Which is not to say that I necessarily have that much in common with a random person born the same year I was.
@David Marjanović: I assumed everyone knew that “Millennials” was what replaced the provisional name “Generation Y.” As to “Zoomers,” let’s check back in ten years. There has been limited uptake of that name; I’ve certainly seen it, but lots of people who have heard it are clearly not using it. Honestly, I don’t think it’s going to happen. (It’s just not fetch.) Like “Generation Y,” it is trying to artificially coin a new, catchy name based on an authentic older one, and that does not typically seem to work. I bet in a decade there will be a different, almost universally accepted name for the post-Millennial cohort. Similarly, whether “Generation α” really catches on, even as a provisional name among demographers, remains to be seen. Those names don’t mean much until there are significant number of adults in the cohort.
@Keith Ivey: Yeah, I don’t particularly like the whole concept. The obsession some people have with drawing lines between specific birth years seems particularly pointless. I know one person who has repeatedly pointed out that “officially” (as she puts it), she and I belong to different generations, since she was born in 1982, which she read somewhere was the first year for the Millennials. (I assume that was based on somebody just subtracting the age a majority from 2000.)
Years earlier, as the definition of “Baby Boomers” seemed to stretch to later and later birthdates, my father complained that it was absurd to suggest that he (born 1949) had more in common with somebody born in 1959 than someone born in 1944. In particular, for American men it made a really big difference to one’s possible life experiences whether one was born before or after January 27, 1955.
a bunch of normal-looking suits sitting around a table
Not even vaguely. (Mongolia 2017)
I’d like emoji more if they weren’t so Western-centric
The first batch of emoji were from Japanese cell carriers. Then Apple and Google got involved, and that got Zapf Dingbats and Wingdings/Webdings into the proto-emoji list. The emoji started arriving from all around the world. Yes, Japan and the West still dominate numerically, but give them time. Emoji by version (warning: takes forever to load this page). You can hover over an emoji to see its identity.
like the rest of Unicode
Nothing could be less Western-centric than Unicode as a whole. Scripts by continent. There are now very, very few living written languages that Unicode can’t handle in at least one of the usual scripts for the language (not counting IPA as a script).
their arch-enemies, the Boomers
My Zoomer grandson is definitely not my arch-enemy, or vice versa.
‘
Jennifer Daniel, the🪑of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee, doesn’t publish her age and I haven’t seen a picture, but she writes like a Zoomer.
I remember reading a long time ago that “Gen X” originally meant ten generations after US independence, i.e., the generation born starting in 1976. So if X is a Roman numeral, following it with “Gen Y” is supremely idiotic. The generation born starting in 1996 should be “Gen XI”. Like they do with Superbowls.
I’m not sure counting in generations from US independence makes a whole lot of sense. Gen IX was born starting in 1956, which is kind of in the middle of an era, according to the way we usually look at things.
I think a lot of people would put the Gen X birth date as after 1966. So Boomers were 1946-1965.
It seems that the meaning of Gen X has been hopelessly confused ever since the time it first came into use.
Over here we count generations as 30 years, most of the time. Must be that pioneering spirit that keeps it at 20. (Or some concept of “mental generations,” I guess).
I remember reading a long time ago that “Gen X” originally meant ten generations after US independence, i.e., the generation born starting in 1976. So if X is a Roman numeral, following it with “Gen Y” is supremely idiotic.
No, it’s that just-so story that’s supremely idiotic. The generous selection of origin stories in the Wikipedia article ends with “Previously, the cohort had been referred to as Post-Boomers, Baby Busters (which refers to the drop in birth rates following the baby boom in the western world, particularly in the U.S.), New Lost Generation, latchkey kids, MTV Generation, and the 13th Generation (the 13th generation since American independence).” (Emphasis added.)
In re emojis, I find it odd that colon-P (surely, I thought, meant originally to suggest a person sticking his tongue out closed-lipped and sideways to convey confusion or puzzlement) becomes a smiling, open-mouthed face sticking its tongue out straight forward. I’ve assumed that this is because the Japanese don’t have the former gesture. Is there a different explanation?
Nothing could be less Western-centric than Unicode as a whole
I had written awkwardly. I meant, Unicode in general is not Western-centric, and I wished the emoji part would follow.
I’d like emoji more if they, like the rest of Unicode, weren’t so Western-centric, particularly when it comes to everyday objects and foods.
When it comes to everyday objects and foods, emoji started out Japanese-centric, due to its origins as a specifically Japanese system; to a large extent, later updates had been focused on balancing that initial Japanese slant, which had indeed made the result noticeably more Western-centric, because the “balancing” had mostly meant adding more Western stuff. Though there’s still many cases where everyday objects have the Japanese version included but not (yet?) the Western equivalent.
Even more recently there’s been some attempt at adding objects/foods from cultures that are neither Western nor Japanese; it’s hard to tell to what extent this had actually succeeded.
@Rodger C: There is a general conflation of emoticons and emoji, which had different origins but are now typically treated as interchangeable. (It might have been less ubiquitous if they had not had coincidentally similar names.) However, there are so many more emoji that there does not seem to be a universal prescription for which emoji should replace which emoticon. A software update on my phone has changed which smiley face automatically replaces :) in my texts. I don’t like the new one, but I haven’t gone to the effort to figure out how to change it back.
As I understand the U.S.-Boomer-male historical timeline, no men born after calendar year 1952 were actually drafted (alhough some volunteered, obviously). 1953-born men at least had their cohort’s “birthday-lottery” ceremony in early ’72, before it was clear that those with low numbers from that year would not, in practice, be drafted. The cohorts born in ’54 through ’56 had nominal birthday lotteries conducted at times when it was already clear that it was politically unlikely they would ever lead to anything. On the other hand, one of the last two U.S. Marines KIA on 4/29/75 during the debacle of the Fall of Saigon was LCpl Darwin Judge, born 2/16/56. He was a volunteer.
You can make the case that the cohort of U.S. Boomers who graduated from high school in ’73 (just before the first oil crisis, not to mention the fallout of Watergate) was the last cohort who might have naively possessed the belief that they would inevitably have more prosperous lives than their parents and everything was just going to be handed to them because they were so special. That’s a significant breakpoint and that cohort would have been mostly born in ’55.
So far, it’s the world from a Western point of view: for food, taco and burrito and “tamale”, Chinese takeout box, and “stuffed flatbread (= döner kebab, falafel, gyro, shwarma)”. Other cultures get a stereotypical nod: alongside four variations on an American suburban house, there’s a round grass-roofed hut, and no other houses. Wild animals are the ones Western zoo-goers have known since forever.
I first heard the phrase “Generation X” in the 1970s, it was the title of a study of the 1960s British Mod subculture; a decade later, a minor punk group took that as their name, while The Clash actually quoted from it on the back cover of their first single (their manager Bernie Rhodes apparently had been a mod as a teenager).
Apart from that, I find that whole current talk of generations ridiculous. If anyone seriously uses terms like “boomer/Gen X-Y-Z/millenial…” I immediately classify them as bullshitters and lazy thinkers. Even back in the 1970s in Germany, I was always annoyed by journalists writing about “die 68-er” — all people I knew who had grown up during that era loathed the tedious politics associated with “1968”. Jimi Hendrix was much more interesting than Rudi Dutschke.
When I see this Western slant, I just realise that I’m using a Western product.
Interestingly, when I see various girls in hijab, I also interpret it as Western attempt to include Muslims (even when seeing it in a messenger’s list when talking to a lady in hijab).
Actually the proposal could easily originate from Saudi Arabia or any Muslim country, I’m just telling how I perceive it.*
*Just checked. The proposal came form Germany (and then Vienna…) but the author was a 15 y.o. Saudi girl.
Oh. And it is comlicated, it is called “person in headsarf”, with a clarification “woman’s headscarf, hijab”.
My hot take is that American journalists invented Boomers and later generations out of envy of the ability of lazy British columnists to crank out another piece on the class system whenever inspiration failed.
Ireland’s postwar demographic and cultural history is very different from the USA’s. Since our baby boom started when theirs ended, we don’t hear much about Boomers (a term I learnt when Trivial Pursuit released a Baby Boomer edition). I hear a little talk about Millennials but it’s mostly negative meta-commentary about the label’s arbitrariness, vagueness, ambiguity, reductionism, etc.
I’m supposedly an “elderly millenial” — the generation that grew up up in Eastern Europe when the Wide wide web was getting established in Eastern Europe in the late ’90s. I had dial-up in 1998 when I was fourteen and I have friends from Bulgaria who were using BBSes in the late ’80s, though, and I used Usenet. I’was born in 1984.
@mollymooly: I think the Baby Boomers came by their name organically, actually, with people talking about the baby boom as a demographic phenomenon before anyone used the name for the people born during that period.
You’ve never been in the same innertube, then. :-Þ
…Huh. I don’t have that gesture either – as Young People Today no doubt say, I was today years old when I learned it existed.
From context, I always took for granted it’s smiling (the P has serifs), and the tongue is meant to stick out in the middle but people just didn’t have access to a proper þorn. That should, though I haven’t seen it often in meatspace, indicate friendly teasing; example above.
I take smileys other than
:)as some combination of (1) what signs themselves look like (2) a face I imagine.I remember I read someone’s review of sorts of beer sold in Russia in 90s, and the author added round eyes
and open mouth smiley (after telling that a certain beer has orange colour) which made me actually laugh.
This specific
8and this specific open mouth combined with my idea of a human face and the author’s emotions looked funny. I’m not sure I combine actual pictures with “my idea” of face this way.