8 ms·

The bad news: - They changed the gun emoji to be a water gun, which has a totally different meaning. This retroactively changes previous writings, changing the

The bad news: - They changed the gun emoji to be a water gun, which has a totally different meaning. This retroactively changes previous writings, changing their meaning. What kind of writing system allows people to change your words after you've written them? Emoji is a trash writing system and an agent of kipplization. - Emoji is controlled by corporations that are concerned with maximizing the value of their platforms which will lead them to a PG13, disneyfied, milquetoast worldview. The good news: - In the entire human history, it has never been easier to create and publish text, audio, or video works of any kind. The most popular platforms have severe limitations, but it only takes the slightest effort to use other platforms that are uncensored. - There is plenty of free software that can give you pixel-level control over your output, you don't need to rely on the unicode consortium or any other organization of any kind to determine what you express.

stcredzero 8y ago
They changed the gun emoji to be a water gun, which has a totally different meaning. This retroactively changes previous writings, changing their meaning. From the op: In his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera linked this kind of forced conformity to a fascist government’s unbounded desire for control, and its efforts to limit expression to kitsch, a cartoonish denial of objective reality This is also a historical feature of communist governments. All governments, and all societies, in as much as they lose a commitment to individual rights, will tend to grab more and more control in pursuit of difficult goals. It's yet another thing that seems "nice" but which has disturbing implications under the surface for free speech, like Canadian Bill C-16.
- fhood 8y ago
  So wait, does that make Apple fascists or communists? Wouldn't want to grab the wrong pitchfork.
  - snerbles 8y ago
    It would more accurately be described as corporate-flavored collectivism. Of course, that doesn't make for a good ingredient in angry epithets.
    - stcredzero 8y ago
      Frank Herbert once made the observation that corporate hierarchies were very similar to feudal hierarchies, just with milder consequences for disloyalty and failure. (The hierarchies within organized crime are even closer to the feudal ones, even including the feudal ceremonial trappings. This even works across cultures, where Japanese organized crime harkens back to feudal Japan and Italian/Sicilian organized crime harkens back to medieval and rennaissance Italy.) Along this line of thinking, corporate flavored collectivism should be structurally similar to Stalinist USSR, including the requirement for ideological conformity. However, the branding is likely to be far, far different. Corporations certainly have purges. Happens all the time after mergers.
  - imnotlost 8y ago
    I think they meant authoritarian, they come in all political stripes
  - kanox 8y ago
    Both, this is why the apple bite is shaped like a horseshoe.
  - fifnir 8y ago
    "authoritarians"
  - ggg9990 8y ago
    Fascists and communists are both animated by the same principle: that Papa knows best and must be obeyed.
  - gojomo 8y ago
    In the prophetic taxonomy of the Dead Kennedys' California Über Alles (https://genius.com/Dead-kennedys-california-uber-alles-lyrics https://genius.com/Dead-kennedys-california-uber-alles-lyric...), they're 'Zen fascists': Zen fascists will control you 100% natural You will jog for the master race And always wear the happy face Though today, they'd be more "fleece/denim secret police".
  - paulddraper 8y ago
    Fascism and communism are not complete opposites. Both are authoritarian political philosophies with a heavy handed approach to economic policies. Differences come in privatization, immigration, equality of rights, and religious toleration. [1] Both have extreme takes on ideas falling under the umbrella of socialist thought (hence, Germany's National Socialist Workers party). You can argue 1984 vs Brave New World, but there are certainly common themes. Both differ significantly from classical liberalism. [1] http://www.differencebetween.net/miscellaneous/politics/ideology-politics/difference-between-socialism-and-fascism/ http://www.differencebetween.net/miscellaneous/politics/ideo...
    - stcredzero 8y ago
      A friend of mine also pointed out that they appear to have different attitudes towards hierarchy. At least, the Marxist derived authoritarians brand themselves as egalitarian -- though they usually go ahead and have hierarchy anyway, having it both ways. Fascists and Nazis also seem to emphasize community while extolling elites, great men, and meritocratic hierarchy -- also having it both ways. It's just that the branding is different.
drostie 8y ago
> What kind of writing system allows people to change your words after you've written them? File this away under "myths programmers believe about language," with some bullet points like, - A word or symbol will always have one meaning. - Okay, but at least those meanings will stay the same over the next decade. - The next year?!
- azeirah 8y ago
  There is a very clear and distinct difference between words changing meaning over time, and drastically changing the appearance of a word or symbol in previously written texts.
  - drostie 8y ago
    No, there isn't. Words change meaning because your present-eyes are different from past-eyes. The gun symbol has changed meaning because your present client is different from past clients.
- 49531 8y ago
  Yea wasn't a big problem we faced during the early days of nuclear technology was creating a symbol that would convey danger over long periods of time, in a world where language is constantly changing.
  - c22 8y ago
    I'm pretty sure this is still considered an open problem.
- PowerfulWizard 8y ago
  I expect at least to be able to view the sequence of symbols that was emitted by the author. Because the majority of writing is digital, and because of the way it is stored, I think changing the emoji is especially deceptive and malicious, but emoji are so silly anyway it is hard to get really properly upset about it. In my opinion if the people that changed the gun emoji had done it by introducing a new watergun emoji, replaced the gun with watergun on the keyboards, and declined to make their devices capable of emitting the sequence of bytes representing the gun, I would have been fine with that, and for their preening purposes I think that would have been sufficient. I'd consider that annoying and rude, but not malicious. If you have a unicode text file with the gun emoji, and you don't know when it was written, you genuinely can't tell what the author wrote as a symbol, even ignoring all the complexities of language, almost as if the word was blurred, and you can't tell between two possibilities.
codingdave 8y ago
> 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.
- setr 8y ago
  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
  - icebraining 8y ago
    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.
    - setr 8y ago
      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
naravara 8y ago
>What kind of writing system allows people to change your words after you've written them? The kind that gave us this: https://i.imgur.com/pfkBj1D.jpg https://i.imgur.com/pfkBj1D.jpg Edit: Turns out this one's a photoshop or this: http://jokeindex.com/images/batman/batman06.jpg http://jokeindex.com/images/batman/batman06.jpg
- FroshKiller 8y ago
  The "solid dick" speech balloon is a Photoshop. The original panel says "solid advice."
  - naravara 8y ago
    Oops, I didn't realize. Edited in a disclaimer, thanks.
- Redoubts 8y ago
  Or this: https://steemitimages.com/DQmbiPZbjmskYPjMc2FuSGV4AcfDwjsNt6mo5eD6ADfhwey/XjPTDSg.jpg https://steemitimages.com/DQmbiPZbjmskYPjMc2FuSGV4AcfDwjsNt6...
  - slavik81 8y ago
    The meaning hasn't changed. That's an intentional double entendre. It's still pretty common. Dyck Insurance was just running radio ads a couple years ago with the slogan "Everybody loves Dyck".
madrox 8y ago
> What kind of writing system allows people to change your words after you've written them? East of Eden's third act is a whole debate about how to interpret "timshel" from the original bible into English, and how those interpretations have warped our thinking.
msla 8y ago
> Emoji is a trash writing system No more trash than any other. Plus... I'm amused at your use of "trash" in that way, given your horror of signifiers changing significance. > There is plenty of free software that can give you pixel-level control over your output, you don't need to rely on the unicode consortium or any other organization of any kind to determine what you express. ... the whole point of having a writing system is having a standard writing system, at least de facto, and without the Unicode Consortium, there would be some other standards body because that's how computer software works. That other standards body would be worse than the Unicode Consortium by virtue of not being the Unicode Consortium, and therefore being either irrelevant or an agent which destroys cross-platform compatibility.
- polotics 8y ago
  Ok so, anyways: what's the unicode value for the unbearable lightness of being?
  - lainga 8y ago
    :forbidden: (ZWJ) :bear: (ZWJ) :on!_symbol: (ZWJ) :flashlight: (ZWJ) :bee: (ZWJ) :ng_symbol:
- PowerfulWizard 8y ago
  I like the english language and writing system, it is the most useful thing I know and I can easily read books from 200 years ago. Here is a 150 year old engineering text book that I can read with relative ease: https://archive.org/stream/manualofcivileng00rankuoft#page/80/mode/2up https://archive.org/stream/manualofcivileng00rankuoft#page/8... . Emoji is a joke and is mainly used for decoration. I agree regarding the Unicode Consortium, the reason I have that under "good news" is that the publication tools we have now are immensely better than what there was in the past, and we can overcome the limitations of reliance on anyone using existing tools. Even though there is a cost, the cost is lower than ever.
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
  >> Emoji is a trash writing system > No more trash than any other. This isn't accurate. Writing systems excluding emoji are used to communicate linguistically. Emoji are not a linguistic phenomenon; they have semantics, but they have no syntax or pronunciation. That's why there's so much anxiety about the image a recipient sees matching the image you sent -- nobody cares if they send a message in one font and the recipient views it in a different font, because there is agreement on what an A is, what an f is, etc. Compare the traditional Chinese character for "come", 來. This is a picture of a stalk of wheat, but people wanted to talk about coming, and they borrowed a word that sounded the same so they could write it down. "Wheat" was originally written this way too, but the concept of coming was so common that "wheat" was driven to a different character, 麥. This all works because the characters are being used to write a language rather than to free-associate based on some pictures which have no specified relationship to each other or anything else. Emoji do not fit in Unicode because they are not part of a writing system. They're a hack for sending image data without having to send the full image over the wire. All languages are completely dependent on a set of words that have no semantic value at all, like the English word "of". Emoji do not support these, and if they did, they wouldn't be emoji.
booleandilemma 8y ago
Emoji is controlled by corporations that are concerned with maximizing the value of their platforms which will lead them to a PG13, disneyfied, milquetoast worldview. I wouldn’t worry too much. People will combat this with creative workarounds, such as using the eggplant emoji to represent a penis.
castlecrasher2 8y ago
Those arguing with you are clearly missing the point. Yes, language can evolve, but emoji are essentially variable expressions interpreted on read by the system reading them. Sure, the meaning of a given word can change over time such that a later reader misunderstands but this is like a blind person having someone read a novel aloud to him one year and the next the reader changes words arbitrarily.
jerkstate 8y ago
> Emoji is a trash writing system I read this as "Emoji is a recycling bin writing system"
fierro 8y ago
Can we gather a list of all those who feel their messages involving the revolver emoji has been harmfully misinterpreted now that it's a water gun emoji? I think the damage of this could be far reaching
skookumchuck 8y ago
Automated politically correct software in the past has "corrected" text like "Jim Bowman" to "Jim Archer".
cryptonector 8y ago
> What kind of writing system allows people to change your words after you've written them? Er, this happens all the time, writing or not. So many words in the languages I speak fluently have changed meaning over hundreds of years -- especially in French! This is not a bad thing, provided the rate of redefinition is low enough and that we record the changes so we can understand older writings.
- baddox 8y ago
  That's a pretty different phenomenon that probably usually occurs much more slowly and not at the whim of a small number of powerful people/organizations.
  - cryptonector 8y ago
    No, it occurs at the whim of the people. I don't know the etymology of it, but I suspect that the "make-out" meaning of "embracer" in French was not a result of "powerful people/organizations" pushing it.
jhanschoo 8y ago
It seems to me that as long as emoji is kept out of serious and mass communications, the variability and imprecision of emoji is no big deal. We engage in imprecise expressions all the time like "urgh", "ew", "yay", and rely on more precise words to clarify the message when the situation calls for it. At the moment, emoji seems to be used in the same class as those imprecise interjections, and I don't see it acquiring technical, precise use anytime soon, given how unwieldy it is to use compared to the 26 characters. So just as a ballet dance, or a particular performance of it, isn't the right medium for world leaders to express international political sentiment, similarly, emoji should not be expected to convey any precise sentiment in critical situations. The author says as much: >If emoji are to become adequate vehicles for discussing public health, the legal system, and art, their depictions need to be molded by users rather than a handful of software companies. I don't think anybody is seriously considering the use of emoji in the way in its current mode of usage for communication when precision is needed. In the first place, there is no standard pronunciation of emoji characters, which in itself is sufficent to make their use in formal documents an iffy suggestion. Arguably, if we ever standardize a reading/interpretation of emoji, the concern raised by the author becomes rendered moot and the choice of graphic representation becomes a stylistic one. When we consider the current imprecise nature of emoji, message corruption due to companies somewhat altering the precise meaning of the emoji become much less significant.
kbutler 8y ago
> This retroactively changes previous writings, This is an overblown/not new concern - emojis have always rendered according to the client platform, so you never knew if, for example, your :-D was going to be a big smile or a laugh to the recipient.
anonu 8y ago
Kipplization... I like that. Had to look it up. But ok... I'll use it.
brokenmachine 8y ago
> What kind of writing system allows people to change your words after you've written them? Ever heard of this book called The Bible? People have been changing the meaning of stuff in there for thousands of years.

stcredzero 8y ago

They changed the gun emoji to be a water gun, which has a totally different meaning. This retroactively changes previous writings, changing their meaning. From the op: In his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera linked this kind of forced conformity to a fascist government’s unbounded desire for control, and its efforts to limit expression to kitsch, a cartoonish denial of objective reality This is also a historical feature of communist governments. All governments, and all societies, in as much as they lose a commitment to individual rights, will tend to grab more and more control in pursuit of difficult goals. It's yet another thing that seems "nice" but which has disturbing implications under the surface for free speech, like Canadian Bill C-16.

fhood 8y ago
So wait, does that make Apple fascists or communists? Wouldn't want to grab the wrong pitchfork.
- snerbles 8y ago
  It would more accurately be described as corporate-flavored collectivism. Of course, that doesn't make for a good ingredient in angry epithets.
  - stcredzero 8y ago
    Frank Herbert once made the observation that corporate hierarchies were very similar to feudal hierarchies, just with milder consequences for disloyalty and failure. (The hierarchies within organized crime are even closer to the feudal ones, even including the feudal ceremonial trappings. This even works across cultures, where Japanese organized crime harkens back to feudal Japan and Italian/Sicilian organized crime harkens back to medieval and rennaissance Italy.) Along this line of thinking, corporate flavored collectivism should be structurally similar to Stalinist USSR, including the requirement for ideological conformity. However, the branding is likely to be far, far different. Corporations certainly have purges. Happens all the time after mergers.
- imnotlost 8y ago
  I think they meant authoritarian, they come in all political stripes
- kanox 8y ago
  Both, this is why the apple bite is shaped like a horseshoe.
- fifnir 8y ago
  "authoritarians"
- ggg9990 8y ago
  Fascists and communists are both animated by the same principle: that Papa knows best and must be obeyed.
- gojomo 8y ago
  In the prophetic taxonomy of the Dead Kennedys' California Über Alles (https://genius.com/Dead-kennedys-california-uber-alles-lyrics https://genius.com/Dead-kennedys-california-uber-alles-lyric...), they're 'Zen fascists': Zen fascists will control you 100% natural You will jog for the master race And always wear the happy face Though today, they'd be more "fleece/denim secret police".
- paulddraper 8y ago
  Fascism and communism are not complete opposites. Both are authoritarian political philosophies with a heavy handed approach to economic policies. Differences come in privatization, immigration, equality of rights, and religious toleration. [1] Both have extreme takes on ideas falling under the umbrella of socialist thought (hence, Germany's National Socialist Workers party). You can argue 1984 vs Brave New World, but there are certainly common themes. Both differ significantly from classical liberalism. [1] http://www.differencebetween.net/miscellaneous/politics/ideology-politics/difference-between-socialism-and-fascism/ http://www.differencebetween.net/miscellaneous/politics/ideo...
  - stcredzero 8y ago
    A friend of mine also pointed out that they appear to have different attitudes towards hierarchy. At least, the Marxist derived authoritarians brand themselves as egalitarian -- though they usually go ahead and have hierarchy anyway, having it both ways. Fascists and Nazis also seem to emphasize community while extolling elites, great men, and meritocratic hierarchy -- also having it both ways. It's just that the branding is different.

drostie 8y ago

> What kind of writing system allows people to change your words after you've written them? File this away under "myths programmers believe about language," with some bullet points like, - A word or symbol will always have one meaning. - Okay, but at least those meanings will stay the same over the next decade. - The next year?!

azeirah 8y ago
There is a very clear and distinct difference between words changing meaning over time, and drastically changing the appearance of a word or symbol in previously written texts.
- drostie 8y ago
  No, there isn't. Words change meaning because your present-eyes are different from past-eyes. The gun symbol has changed meaning because your present client is different from past clients.
49531 8y ago
Yea wasn't a big problem we faced during the early days of nuclear technology was creating a symbol that would convey danger over long periods of time, in a world where language is constantly changing.
- c22 8y ago
  I'm pretty sure this is still considered an open problem.
PowerfulWizard 8y ago
I expect at least to be able to view the sequence of symbols that was emitted by the author. Because the majority of writing is digital, and because of the way it is stored, I think changing the emoji is especially deceptive and malicious, but emoji are so silly anyway it is hard to get really properly upset about it. In my opinion if the people that changed the gun emoji had done it by introducing a new watergun emoji, replaced the gun with watergun on the keyboards, and declined to make their devices capable of emitting the sequence of bytes representing the gun, I would have been fine with that, and for their preening purposes I think that would have been sufficient. I'd consider that annoying and rude, but not malicious. If you have a unicode text file with the gun emoji, and you don't know when it was written, you genuinely can't tell what the author wrote as a symbol, even ignoring all the complexities of language, almost as if the word was blurred, and you can't tell between two possibilities.

codingdave 8y ago

> 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.

setr 8y ago
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
- icebraining 8y ago
  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.
  - setr 8y ago
    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

naravara 8y ago

>What kind of writing system allows people to change your words after you've written them? The kind that gave us this: https://i.imgur.com/pfkBj1D.jpg https://i.imgur.com/pfkBj1D.jpg Edit: Turns out this one's a photoshop or this: http://jokeindex.com/images/batman/batman06.jpg http://jokeindex.com/images/batman/batman06.jpg

FroshKiller 8y ago
The "solid dick" speech balloon is a Photoshop. The original panel says "solid advice."
- naravara 8y ago
  Oops, I didn't realize. Edited in a disclaimer, thanks.
Redoubts 8y ago
Or this: https://steemitimages.com/DQmbiPZbjmskYPjMc2FuSGV4AcfDwjsNt6mo5eD6ADfhwey/XjPTDSg.jpg https://steemitimages.com/DQmbiPZbjmskYPjMc2FuSGV4AcfDwjsNt6...
- slavik81 8y ago
  The meaning hasn't changed. That's an intentional double entendre. It's still pretty common. Dyck Insurance was just running radio ads a couple years ago with the slogan "Everybody loves Dyck".

madrox 8y ago

> What kind of writing system allows people to change your words after you've written them? East of Eden's third act is a whole debate about how to interpret "timshel" from the original bible into English, and how those interpretations have warped our thinking.

msla 8y ago

> Emoji is a trash writing system No more trash than any other. Plus... I'm amused at your use of "trash" in that way, given your horror of signifiers changing significance. > There is plenty of free software that can give you pixel-level control over your output, you don't need to rely on the unicode consortium or any other organization of any kind to determine what you express. ... the whole point of having a writing system is having a standard writing system, at least de facto, and without the Unicode Consortium, there would be some other standards body because that's how computer software works. That other standards body would be worse than the Unicode Consortium by virtue of not being the Unicode Consortium, and therefore being either irrelevant or an agent which destroys cross-platform compatibility.

polotics 8y ago
Ok so, anyways: what's the unicode value for the unbearable lightness of being?
- lainga 8y ago
  :forbidden: (ZWJ) :bear: (ZWJ) :on!_symbol: (ZWJ) :flashlight: (ZWJ) :bee: (ZWJ) :ng_symbol:
PowerfulWizard 8y ago
I like the english language and writing system, it is the most useful thing I know and I can easily read books from 200 years ago. Here is a 150 year old engineering text book that I can read with relative ease: https://archive.org/stream/manualofcivileng00rankuoft#page/80/mode/2up https://archive.org/stream/manualofcivileng00rankuoft#page/8... . Emoji is a joke and is mainly used for decoration. I agree regarding the Unicode Consortium, the reason I have that under "good news" is that the publication tools we have now are immensely better than what there was in the past, and we can overcome the limitations of reliance on anyone using existing tools. Even though there is a cost, the cost is lower than ever.
thaumasiotes 8y ago
>> Emoji is a trash writing system > No more trash than any other. This isn't accurate. Writing systems excluding emoji are used to communicate linguistically. Emoji are not a linguistic phenomenon; they have semantics, but they have no syntax or pronunciation. That's why there's so much anxiety about the image a recipient sees matching the image you sent -- nobody cares if they send a message in one font and the recipient views it in a different font, because there is agreement on what an A is, what an f is, etc. Compare the traditional Chinese character for "come", 來. This is a picture of a stalk of wheat, but people wanted to talk about coming, and they borrowed a word that sounded the same so they could write it down. "Wheat" was originally written this way too, but the concept of coming was so common that "wheat" was driven to a different character, 麥. This all works because the characters are being used to write a language rather than to free-associate based on some pictures which have no specified relationship to each other or anything else. Emoji do not fit in Unicode because they are not part of a writing system. They're a hack for sending image data without having to send the full image over the wire. All languages are completely dependent on a set of words that have no semantic value at all, like the English word "of". Emoji do not support these, and if they did, they wouldn't be emoji.

booleandilemma 8y ago

Emoji is controlled by corporations that are concerned with maximizing the value of their platforms which will lead them to a PG13, disneyfied, milquetoast worldview. I wouldn’t worry too much. People will combat this with creative workarounds, such as using the eggplant emoji to represent a penis.

castlecrasher2 8y ago

Those arguing with you are clearly missing the point. Yes, language can evolve, but emoji are essentially variable expressions interpreted on read by the system reading them. Sure, the meaning of a given word can change over time such that a later reader misunderstands but this is like a blind person having someone read a novel aloud to him one year and the next the reader changes words arbitrarily.

jerkstate 8y ago

> Emoji is a trash writing system I read this as "Emoji is a recycling bin writing system"

fierro 8y ago

Can we gather a list of all those who feel their messages involving the revolver emoji has been harmfully misinterpreted now that it's a water gun emoji? I think the damage of this could be far reaching

skookumchuck 8y ago

Automated politically correct software in the past has "corrected" text like "Jim Bowman" to "Jim Archer".

cryptonector 8y ago

> What kind of writing system allows people to change your words after you've written them? Er, this happens all the time, writing or not. So many words in the languages I speak fluently have changed meaning over hundreds of years -- especially in French! This is not a bad thing, provided the rate of redefinition is low enough and that we record the changes so we can understand older writings.

baddox 8y ago
That's a pretty different phenomenon that probably usually occurs much more slowly and not at the whim of a small number of powerful people/organizations.
- cryptonector 8y ago
  No, it occurs at the whim of the people. I don't know the etymology of it, but I suspect that the "make-out" meaning of "embracer" in French was not a result of "powerful people/organizations" pushing it.

jhanschoo 8y ago

It seems to me that as long as emoji is kept out of serious and mass communications, the variability and imprecision of emoji is no big deal. We engage in imprecise expressions all the time like "urgh", "ew", "yay", and rely on more precise words to clarify the message when the situation calls for it. At the moment, emoji seems to be used in the same class as those imprecise interjections, and I don't see it acquiring technical, precise use anytime soon, given how unwieldy it is to use compared to the 26 characters. So just as a ballet dance, or a particular performance of it, isn't the right medium for world leaders to express international political sentiment, similarly, emoji should not be expected to convey any precise sentiment in critical situations. The author says as much: >If emoji are to become adequate vehicles for discussing public health, the legal system, and art, their depictions need to be molded by users rather than a handful of software companies. I don't think anybody is seriously considering the use of emoji in the way in its current mode of usage for communication when precision is needed. In the first place, there is no standard pronunciation of emoji characters, which in itself is sufficent to make their use in formal documents an iffy suggestion. Arguably, if we ever standardize a reading/interpretation of emoji, the concern raised by the author becomes rendered moot and the choice of graphic representation becomes a stylistic one. When we consider the current imprecise nature of emoji, message corruption due to companies somewhat altering the precise meaning of the emoji become much less significant.

kbutler 8y ago

> This retroactively changes previous writings, This is an overblown/not new concern - emojis have always rendered according to the client platform, so you never knew if, for example, your :-D was going to be a big smile or a laugh to the recipient.

anonu 8y ago

Kipplization... I like that. Had to look it up. But ok... I'll use it.

brokenmachine 8y ago

> What kind of writing system allows people to change your words after you've written them? Ever heard of this book called The Bible? People have been changing the meaning of stuff in there for thousands of years.