5 ms·
An Emoji from 1803
- donohoe 5y agoBefore this, the earliest example that people had found was 1862 https://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/19/hfo-emoticon/ https://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/19/hfo-emoticon/
- gibspaulding 5y agoThe glyph is much older than that, though perhaps the usage was slightly different. Wikipedia says they were being hand drawn as early as the 1100's and were being used on printing presses by 1484. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_(typography) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_(typography)
- rsynnott 5y agoI think the interesting thing here is not so much that the glyph exists (lots of typographical symbols have existed for a long time) but that it is being used much as we use emojis today.
- yreg 5y agoThe server redirects me to err 503 after a short moment. Here's an archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20210818212153/https://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/19/hfo-emoticon/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210818212153/https://cityroom....
- donohoe 5y agoHmm. Still works for me but thank you for providing the archive URL.
- ModernMech 5y agoHuh, the use of the word "fellow" here I've never seen before. It probably means this: a. obsolete : a person of one of the lower social classes b. archaic : a worthless man or boy
- hprotagonist 5y agoI mentally deleted the following comma to obtain “a fellow at whom the finger ..”, in which case it’s just the common sense of ‘person’, with some extra connotations of condescension.
- indymike 5y ago"Fellow" also means "a member of a group of high-ranking teachers at a particular college or university or of a particular educational society". I believe he was saying roughly that Mr. Luckett was a member of the college deserving of the finger of contempt. This was an extremely well played insult.
- colanderman 5y ago> 6. (obsolete) A man without good breeding or worth; an ignoble or mean man. from https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fellow https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fellow
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y agoThe "pointing finger" symbol is quite old. I'll bet that it would be easy to find its use, well before this. Although its use, in this ad, is pretty much exactly how we use emojis, these days.
- OJFord 5y agoI don't think anybody's suggesting the printer gained the capability to print the finger just for this - it's the latter, the way its used, that's somewhat interesting here.
- busyant 5y agoManicule https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_(typography) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_(typography)
- rvz 5y agoPrecisely. It is not an emoji and is under the miscellaneous unicode symbols in most OSes and the like. Not exactly 'Emojis'. But of course on Twitter, misinformation is ok. Downvoters: So you're telling me it is an emoji then? Is '' an emoji then? Can you see it?
- wildywayz 5y agoDoesn't matter what it was. https://emojipedia.org/black-left-pointing-index/ https://emojipedia.org/black-left-pointing-index/
- rvz 5y agoYou mean this? (U+261A) and not (U+1F448) [0] [1]? From: [0] > This Unicode character has no emoji version, meaning this is intended to display only as a black and white glyph on most platforms. I guess that means '' and 'U+261A' are emojis then? [0] https://emojipedia.org/black-left-pointing-index/ https://emojipedia.org/black-left-pointing-index/ [1] https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+261A https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+261A
- jfk13 5y agoTraditionally, we'd just have called that a dingbat. (See U+261E, in the long-established Dingbats block of Unicode.)
- signa11 5y agowouldn’t egyptian hieroglyphs count as them from waay back ?
- OJFord 5y agoNo, because they weren't (as far as I know?) used within a body of text written using a different alphabet system?
- pbhjpbhj 5y agoI may be mistaken but I seem to recall that when [Egyptian] pictograms were later adapted to be syllabic representations (letters) there was a crossover period where the pictogram was used both as a 'word' (representing the whole thing the pictogram showed, a horned viper say) and also used in the same text to represent a sound/syllable (f; which is a 90 degree rotated viper!). I cannot recall where I got this from however, possibly from a YouTube lecture by Irvin Finkel (I think it was he) or from the recent Netflix on the Saqqara tomb (less likely)?? https://collector.com/12-animal-hieroglyphs-and-how-the-ancient-egyptians-used-them/ https://collector.com/12-animal-hieroglyphs-and-how-the-anci... lends credence to this without getting us all the way there.
- mirekrusin 5y agoEqually interesting is "it's twitter from 1803" - "TO THE PUBLIC" it was called back then.
- marstall 5y agoha true. also a touch of those trashy "you won't believe what happened next" ads
- mirekrusin 5y agoImagine, you could actually see adverts for real "snake oil"!
- marstall 5y agosoooo curious how Otho H.W. Lockett responded ... seems like a potential pistols at dawn type of scenario
- jimmaswell 5y agohttps://yeoldenews.tumblr.com/post/617391302806568960/yeoldenews-i-feel-like-we-need-to-stop-twitter/amp?__twitter_impression=true https://yeoldenews.tumblr.com/post/617391302806568960/yeolde...
- marstall 5y agodamn! ask and ye shall receive. so cool. thanks :)
- leephillips 5y ago“Braggadocio” is due for a revival.
- mproud 5y agoWow, he gave him the finger!
- susam 5y ago> TO THE PUBLIC. HAVING received an Inſult from Otho H. W. Luckett, for which he refuſed to make the Reparation demanded—I do declare him a Coward, a Braggadochio, and a Fellow, at whom the <white right pointing index finger symbol here> Finger of Contempt ſhould always be pointed. WILLIAM CHAPMAN. Frederick-Town, Sept. 23, 1803· 3w The usage of the long s (ſ), the archaic form of the letter "s", is also quite interesting. Note how "Inſult", "refuſed", and "ſhould" are written with the long s but "always" is written with the short s because it occurs at the end of the word. The long s is one of my favourite extinct characters because it is the ancestor of the current day integral symbol (∫) introduced by Leibniz.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mrunseen 5y agoIt is also found at German eszett ß, which essentially is a ligature of “ſs”. Also that index finger is actually a unicode character ( U+261A)
- eigenschwarz 5y agoLove Isaac Newton's use of the manicule: https://log.nikhil.io/posts/78a93e2073695830831f94eb80032ace/ https://log.nikhil.io/posts/78a93e2073695830831f94eb80032ace...
- gpvos 5y agoU+261E FINGER OF CONTEMPT
- gpvos 5y agoIn fact, in the Unicode charts, U+261E WHITE RIGHT POINTING INDEX has as an informative alias: "= fist (typographic term)". So there is some evidence of belligerence there already. Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fist_(typography) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fist_(typography) .
- foresto 5y agoThe Dreadful Flying Glove (Yellow Submarine, 1968) suddenly feels all the more menacing. https://yellowsubmarine.fandom.com/wiki/The_Dreadful_Flying_Glove https://yellowsubmarine.fandom.com/wiki/The_Dreadful_Flying_...
- jcadam 5y agoMy ancestor's discharge papers from the US Army during the civil war make use of the "pointed finger" where nowadays one would naturally use bullet points.
- bckr 5y agoI expected to have cause to say "that's not an emoji, that's an emoticon", but I did not have such cause.
- willsoon 5y agoI read in some Nabokov's interview back in my time. At some point the questions goes like how do you would rank yourself among other contemporaries writers or something along that. He responds that it should be a typography sign, like a lying closing parenthesis, and then he would trace it as the proper answer. For me, it was the first time I hear about a emoji.
- whoomp12342 5y agoits a tricky one. FInger of contempt = awful, bad Two fingers of contempt pointing in the same direction = aaayyyyy