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A hundred years from now people are going to have a very... interesting time trying to figure out what meaning was intended by the use of these characters at th

A hundred years from now people are going to have a very... interesting time trying to figure out what meaning was intended by the use of these characters at the time a text was written. Personally, I think putting a huge set of pictograms into the Universal Character Set was a mistake and that emojis should be deprecated immediately, and this is the #1 reason why: the meaning of a text should not normally change based on the font used to render it.

gruez 2y ago
>A hundred years from now people are going to have a very... interesting time trying to figure out what meaning was intended by the use of these characters at the time a text was written. Is this any different than for words? "Retarded" used used to be the polite way to convey intellectual disability, until it slowly turned into a pejorative. Same word, different meaning. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism#Lifespan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism#Lifespan
- AdamH12113 2y ago
  Sure, meaning always depends on context, but this is a lower-level difference. If I copy an English sentence from a hundred-year-old book into Microsoft Word, it doesn't change the meaning of the sentence. If I write a sentence containing emojis on e.g. an Android phone and read that exact bitwise-equivalent text string on an Apple phone on the same day, it could have a wildly different meaning because of the font. This has already happened -- a few years ago Apple updated their font to have colored foot emojis, which sparked some controversy[1] because the version of the feet for black skin tones (incorrectly) depicted the sole of the foot as black. There was a thread on Twitter (can't find a link, sadly) where someone was confused by the posts talking about this because their Android phone's version of the emoji showed a side view of a foot instead of a bottom view. The original tweet was unintelligible to this reader because they were using a different font than the writer. One of the advantages of written language is that it's based on a discrete set of symbols that are used to form discrete words. This allows writing to last much longer than many other forms of communication. Emojis are a weird semi-discrete hybrid form of communication, which means they're bound to cause problems as time goes on. [1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-6347073/People-outraged-Apples-new-feet-emojis.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-6347073/People-ou...

gruez 2y ago

>A hundred years from now people are going to have a very... interesting time trying to figure out what meaning was intended by the use of these characters at the time a text was written. Is this any different than for words? "Retarded" used used to be the polite way to convey intellectual disability, until it slowly turned into a pejorative. Same word, different meaning. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism#Lifespan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism#Lifespan

AdamH12113 2y ago
Sure, meaning always depends on context, but this is a lower-level difference. If I copy an English sentence from a hundred-year-old book into Microsoft Word, it doesn't change the meaning of the sentence. If I write a sentence containing emojis on e.g. an Android phone and read that exact bitwise-equivalent text string on an Apple phone on the same day, it could have a wildly different meaning because of the font. This has already happened -- a few years ago Apple updated their font to have colored foot emojis, which sparked some controversy[1] because the version of the feet for black skin tones (incorrectly) depicted the sole of the foot as black. There was a thread on Twitter (can't find a link, sadly) where someone was confused by the posts talking about this because their Android phone's version of the emoji showed a side view of a foot instead of a bottom view. The original tweet was unintelligible to this reader because they were using a different font than the writer. One of the advantages of written language is that it's based on a discrete set of symbols that are used to form discrete words. This allows writing to last much longer than many other forms of communication. Emojis are a weird semi-discrete hybrid form of communication, which means they're bound to cause problems as time goes on. [1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-6347073/People-outraged-Apples-new-feet-emojis.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-6347073/People-ou...