The surprising history (and politics) of emoji, with Keith Houston
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Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and on these Thursday shows, we talk about things that are generally interesting about language. And I am here with Keith Houston, who runs the blog Shady Characters. He has a book by the same name, Shady Characters, which is fabulous. And he has a new book called Face with Tears of Joy, all about emoji. And emoji are also just a fascinating thing that we do with communication. Keith, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast.

Thank you. Thanks for having me. Yeah. So, you know, emoji, I was surprised they go back much farther than I originally thought. Can you talk a little bit about what was the first emoji? I think it depends what you mean by emoji. So there are smiley faces on prehistoric pots, for example, just a couple of daubs of ink or soot that show you a face.

If you then wait, you get into the medieval period and a lot of readers, interestingly, not writers of books, but readers of books would draw little pictures in the margins to call out something interesting, little pointing hands. And there are lots of pointing hand emoji. So you go from, okay, there are smiley faces and hands that look a bit like emoji. And then eventually you get into 18th century Japan.

and people are printing books which are composed not of Japanese logographic writing, but of actual pictures that are entire stories told using only numbers and little pictures.

And then if you'd like, well, what is that? Is an emoji a yellow smiling face? The first of those was designed in the 1960s. The most iconic one, the one that everyone would recognize, was designed by an American graphic designer called Harvey Ball in the 1960s. But if you finally get to an icon on a computer screen, then we're still not an emoji. Before smartphones and before smart devices, just as the home computer was becoming more popular,

Some of these computers had what were called, well, all computers have got what are called character sets. This is a list of characters or symbols the computer knows how to display. And some of these...

Some of these fairly early, late 70s, early 80s ones have got characters like little smiley faces and suits of cards and arrows and so on. And the idea was these could be used in games that used characters to represent, you know, well, whatever, I guess a game of cards or wandering around a dungeon or something. So these electronic icons have been around for quite a long time as well. But finally, if you wait until you get to 1980s Japan, this is where the first things we might see

think of as being emoji, I guess, or canonically think of as being emoji. So a collection of little icons that you can put in amongst your text on an electronic device and then send them to another device.

Is that like the Zapf Dingbats font? Was that sort of one of the earlier character sets or do you consider that more on the first emoji? So Zapf Dingbats is really interesting. When people printed things, when people still had to set type by hand, you know, plucking little lead characters out of these big trays and composing entire pages, they would use what are called pie fonts. So whenever they did a special P-I as opposed to P-I-E,

Whenever they needed a special character, a mathematical character or an arrow or a hand or something, the regular fonts wouldn't have these. So they'd go to a Python, they'd find the thing they needed, put it in and then put it back again. Zap Dingbats is an electronic Python. It's just a collection of characters.

And back in the late 80s, early 90s, there were too many computer character sets. And you could send a document from one computer to another and they could disagree and you'd see just garbled text on screen. So an organization was formed called Unicode to unify all of these different character sets together. And Zapfdingbats was quite popular at the time. And they said, you know what, we'll just take all of these. We'll just put them into this standard called Unicode and people can use them.

And that was fine, they were there. And then finally, when Unicode got interested in emoji in the early 2000s, they realized they already had lots of emoji characters in the standard because of fonts like Zap Dingbats and other PyFonts. So they're separate, but it's convergent evolution, perhaps. So they kind of converged. But the first emoji, what we would think of today as emoji, were on Japanese phones. And the word emoji does come from Japan, right? It does.

It does. So it means roughly picture character. But it turns out they were actually slightly earlier than phones. The phones were, I think, 1997, 1999. Just before that, you may remember that we, people, humanity used to use these personal digital assistants, little palm top computers. They weren't necessarily connected to anything, right? Like a Palm Pilot.

And lots of these were made in Japan by companies like Canon and Sharp and Fujitsu. And it turns out there's one particular, I think it's called a Sharp PA something or other, PA8000. And this appears to have the first emoji set. But perhaps even before that,

So weirdly, Japan didn't really take to the home computer for quite a long time. And in some ways, it still hasn't in the same way as the Western world. But what a lot of Japanese people did use were word processors. So a kind of combination of a printer and a keyboard and a tiny screen. And you could enter emoji in some of these word processors. So first, it looks like it was word processors, then these little PDAs, and then finally, phones and smartphones later on. So it's

It was a source of some frustration to me that I could never really put my finger on one device or one icon and say, this was the first emoji. There's a spectrum. There's a very long tail, but it's back to front. Yeah. And you probably have an opinion on the what's the plural of emoji. Is it emoji or emojis? I think in Japanese it would be just emoji. It's rather than emojis. And so I try to use that throughout the book.

But honestly, I don't know. I think I find myself sometimes typing emojis without really meaning to. So use whichever feels most natural, I think. Nice. So there's so much to say about emoji. Okay. So you talked about the Unicode consortium. So if you want to make a new emoji, it's actually a formal process. Can you talk a little bit about the consortium and what they do? It is. It's a really weird setup. It's a nonprofit corporation that

is basically supported by a pile of big tech companies like Google, Apple, Meta, and so on. And they pay something like $50,000 a year to be members. And there are quite a few of them. And this company or this nonprofit has the job of maintaining this single character set that most computers understand. I think something like 98% or 99% of all web pages use Unicode.

And they have a process whereby you can propose a new emoji. You can say, I think this symbol should be added to the current set of emoji. And they will evaluate your proposal. You need to prove a number of different things. It can't be a copyrighted icon. There needs to be some demonstrated level of need or support for it. It can't be too close to an existing emoji. They prefer it if it fills in an obvious gap in the emoji standard. So it turns out to...

be quite tricky to get a new emoji accepted. And in fact, Unicode has said lately that pretty much there are too many emoji and they don't really want to just keep on adding them ad infinitum. So there's kind of an effort at the moment to slow things down and to say, can we get away without this?

But there is another subtlety in that Unicode gave themselves a kind of get out of jail free card. Normally what happens is if any new character goes into Unicode, the Unicode consortium argues it out, they vote it, they vote on it, they approve it. It goes to a whole other ISO standards organization that again is ratified.

Unicode said, if you can devise a new emoji that's made up of existing emoji and you kind of glue them together with special hidden characters, then they don't need to go through this full approval process. Yeah. So some emoji are blends of two characters. Am I remembering right? Does that change how they're stored on the computer? Do they use less memory when they're made that way? Yeah.

What happens is there's, I'll pick an example, my favorite example. There's a service dog emoji, which is a dog wearing a little high visibility vest. And under the hood, this is a dog emoji and a special kind of glue character called a zero width joiner. And then another one, which is the safety vest emoji. So safety vest emoji plus dog emoji plus

on screen is displayed as a service dog. Now it's almost like you're spelling a word, you're like spelling an emoji word with, you know, by composing multiple emojis together. But

The weird thing is, there's nothing magic here. Unicode have said there is a symbol called service dog and the way that it is spelled is this. So your computer isn't magically taking a dog and a service vest, sorry, safety vest and figuring out how to put them together. It knows that if it sees these two things, actually it means another thing. So there are quite a few subtleties in the way this works.

But the upshot is it means that some emoji can be really costly in terms of how much storage they require. Or if you send a message, it doesn't matter in most modern systems. We've got plenty of bandwidth, plenty of storage, but in an SMS message, for example, an old fashioned text message on a phone, if you use some of these emoji, they can take up the same space as two or four or eight normal characters, depending on what it is. And is that something...

thing that if I know the secret code or something, I can blend any two emojis. Can I make a service dolphin if I want to? Or is that something that has to be done by the platforms? Unfortunately, Unicode has to build your service dolphin for you. This is the thing. As neat as this is, it's not magic. It still needs a human to say, we need a service dolphin emoji. And they need to agree on it and they need to say, well, this is going to be a dolphin and a zero width joiner and a safety vest. And

these together will constitute a service dolphin. Nice idea though. I feel like we should pursue that.

Yes, I like it too. You said that Unicode feels like maybe there are too many emoji. And I have to say, when I'm looking for one on my phone, especially when I don't have access to search, I feel like they are almost infinite. How many total official emoji are there? It's really hard to say. It changes from year to year, sometimes multiple times in a year, but broadly. Actually,

Let's explain why it's difficult. So you have the first emoji were individual characters. They were brought over from fonts like Zapfdingbats or brought over from Japanese mobile phones.

And a yellow smiley face is just the one character. That's easy enough. A picture of a human face, whether it's a child or just a regular person or an older person, that's also just one emoji. But if you want them to have a different skin color, then that is more emoji. There's a special emoji you can append, which will change the skin color of certain emoji.

If you want to transform them from just a gender neutral person into a boy or a girl or a man or a woman or an older man or an older woman, that's another emoji that comes along and has to be appended. And so you have got some of these kind of primitive emoji, these basic ones, which are just single characters. You've got lots of other composite ones like the service dog, service dolphin emoji.

And you've got a few other kind of special ones like flags, for example. So every emoji flag is two characters. So for the UK, there's a special letter U and a special letter K that when they're put together, they turn into a UK flag. The US flag is a U and an S and so on.

So what all this means is that there are, depending on how you count, about 1,400 kind of basic emoji and about 3,800 when you take into account all the composite ones as well. Wow. Yeah, that was one thing that really surprised me about your book is how...

political emoji actually are. Like, I forget what country it was, but the other day I was looking for a flag emoji and there was not a flag emoji for the particular country I wanted one for. Then I, you know, I'm a Mac user and I didn't realize like Windows just doesn't even support the flag emoji. You said like they just don't want to get into it because it's so political. And it's just it was fascinating. And then I think

probably the story that people would be interested in that they wouldn't have thought of maybe is the one about a person with blonde hair and the history of that and how it makes it different.

Yeah, the person with blonde hair is quite a boring looking emoji. It's just a person with blonde hair. And it turns out that it's quite an old one. It was one of the ones that was imported from Japan. Unicode kind of looked at, well, we'll look at NTT and KDDI and JFO and all the different Japanese mobile vendors, and we'll just put all of the emoji together. And it turns out that two of them had blonde people as emoji. One was a blonde woman, I think, one was a blonde man. And

they just kind of imported it. They said, okay, we'll turn this into a blonde person. We'll bring this into Unicode. But they also brought in a couple of other emoji from Japan as well. One of them was a person wearing a turban. One of them was a person wearing a particular sort of Chinese cap, a kind of small skull cap. And these were emoji that existed in Japan, and they were kind of a little bit problematic in some senses. So it turns out that

These were emoji that were effectively meant to represent the stereotype of a Westerner or the stereotype of an Indian person or a stereotype of a Chinese person. And I guess it was an earlier time. It was not unacceptable. It was perhaps wasn't as unacceptable to do that sort of thing. They were brought into Unicode and now they're in Unicode. They were only brought in in order to maintain backwards compatibility with emoji that already existed. But Unicode never removes anything.

This is why they're so strict about what goes in, because they will never take anything out. So these are now in there as kind of reminders that we live in a different time, perhaps a better time now. It's like the Oxford English Dictionary. They never remove a word. And I'm sure there are plenty of offensive words in there.

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So the person with blonde hair emoji originally was representative of Westerners. And so they're

In general, yeah. In general. And then when people wanted the big emoji set to be more inclusive and have people with all different kinds of hair, like the person with the blonde hair was already there, but it had a different meaning to start with. I just thought that was so interesting. Yeah. Hair color and, well, I guess Unicode basically went through... What they do is every year or so, they look at the emoji that exists and think, do we need to extend this? Do we need to change this? And there were a few years where really big changes happened. So...

I mean, to be honest, a lot of emoji have been quite problematic for quite a long time. So one of the first big updates was to add professions that were no longer gender specific. So often you'd see a police officer and they'd be drawn as a man and you might see a dancer and be drawn as a woman. And Unicode went through a process of saying, this isn't really cool. These should it should be possible to render these as a man or a woman. And then later as actually just gender neutral, it shouldn't matter.

I mean, honestly, emoji are so tiny. A lot of the time, I think that the gender of emoji is lost on me anyway. Honestly, often I can't tell what they are. They're so small. If it's not what I know. Yeah. So it shouldn't matter in a sense. And yet it was quite a big deal at the time. So gender was a big thing.

Skin color was another big thing. There was one year where suddenly emoji went from pretty much uniformly light-skinned to yellow-skinned, but you could also, as in bright yellow, cartoonish yellow. And then you could also choose a spectrum of colors from sort of white, very light-skinned through to quite dark black-skinned emoji as well.

And then hair was a kind of a later addition. Apparently there were lots of petitions for people asking for red haired emoji. And so there's a bit of work done to have people with red hair, people with curly hair, which was kind of a stand in for a kind of, you know, sort of kinky Afro African or African American hair. I think it's debatable as to whether it's been very successful, but there's sort of, there's, sorry, there was a red hair emoji.

white hair, curly hair, and no hair. But blonde hair was left out because there was always this one emoji which was just person with blonde hair. So again, the hair update was good, but it didn't apply to very many emoji and in some ways it's still incomplete, I think. It's so complicated. And you talk about how now there are emoji seasons, like the release of new emoji is an event, kind of like, "It's emoji season! We got a new set of emoji!" And people get excited.

I remember I was excited about the maracas because in my example sentences, squiggly often plays maracas. Oh, I see. I see. Okay, that's handy. Yeah, I can't claim credit for the emoji season name. I think that was Jeremy Burge who founded Emojipedia, who invented the term. But yeah, there was this, for a long time, there was this kind of yearly buzzword.

bonanza, yearly harvest of new emoji where lots of tech websites and basically everyone, newspapers, gossip magazines and so on would all pile on and see what the new emoji were that year. And they were occasionally a little bit controversial. Again, the hair update was like, well, where's this sort of hair? Where's that sort of hair?

Often what happened was there was a bit of an outcry. So it was plain that emoji were quite biased initially towards Japanese culture and towards a very binary man versus woman type view of the world. And so the Unicode have chipped away at these. And so some emoji seasons have been quite significantly improved things, which is nice to see. Yeah, and as you said, that's why it's hard to count because there are modifications of some of the individual emoji now too. You can apply all these different things to them.

You know, let's talk about emoji and communication. You know, you said the majority of emoji users actually don't use emoji for their actual like literal meaning. And I started thinking also, so your book, Faced with Tears of Joy, like what does this emoji mean? I use this to mean laughing hard, but that's not the same as faced with tears of joy. Am I using it wrong?

Wow, that's so, that's a really interesting question. I suppose, what is an emoji? What is a face with tears of joy emoji? It's a collection of pictures that are, sorry, a collection of pixels that depict the face of some abstract being who is crying with joy. That's what it is. That is the face, that's the face value of that emoji.

And so even just by appending it to the end of a sentence, maybe a joke or you're responding to, you know, saying, oh, that's really funny. And you put that at the end, you're already using it in a sort of metaphorical way. You're not saying I am a small round yellow person who's crying with tears of joy. You're saying I am crying with tears of joy. You're already abstracting its meaning a little bit. So I would argue that almost no emoji is used literally to refer to the thing that's depicted. But

But I think there's a kind of spectrum as to what that can mean. So you can sometimes use an emoji in just an ironic way. So, you know, someone tells a joke, which is obviously very bad, and you post a face with tears of joy emoji. You don't really mean that. You know, you're being sarcastic or ironic. You can also use emoji in kind of a metaphorical way. So...

I think lately, a lot of people, I say lately, probably for a few years now, people often use a skull to mean I have died of laughter. It doesn't mean I've literally died. There are skulls around here. It just means I'm dead because I died laughing. So you're using the skull in a metaphorical way. Red flag is sometimes used to mean this is problematic behavior. It doesn't mean I or anyone else is waving or possesses a red flag. It's just a literal translation or a literal use of the name of that emoji to mean something

different to the depiction of the emoji itself. You can use them as the sound. So if you have a bee emoji, that can be a bee sound. You can use it as the word bee. Yeah, pretty much anything. So I think even the shape, even the shape of emoji, I think I've seen people use, there's a kind of jazz hands emoji. And that has been, it's been suggested that people are using it to mean the letter W because it looks vaguely like a W. Yeah.

Oh, like when I want to say whatever to someone, I could send the jazz hand to Maggie? Yeah, so now you're already, again, yeah, there are layers of metaphor there, right? That's really interesting. And there are generational differences too. Like I'm not sure like Gen Alpha would get my whatever reference maybe. I don't know. Is there a Gen Alpha? Is that where we are now? Oh my gosh. Yes.

So do people from different generations use emoji differently? They do. I mean, I'm not an expert in this aspect of emoji, so anything I say should be taken with a pinch of salt.

My impression is that a lot of things are actually surprisingly common. One of the emoji that I looked at in weirdly a lot of detail is the poo emoji or the poop emoji, the smiling poop, which was one of the very first ones brought over from Japan. And there have been a couple of surveys fairly recently that show that

No one likes it. It doesn't matter whether you're Gen Z or Gen Z or millennial or I guess Gen Alpha. No one likes the poop emoji. It's like consistently voted to be one of the least popular emoji and it's relatively rarely used. So it's like 80th on the league table, again, depending on how you count different emoji. So there are consistencies. I suspect where things change, it's in that metaphorical sense, the use of a skull. I think that might pass by a lot of people

people potentially of my generation, or maybe I'm just really uncool, maybe older people, they would pass by. I think it's that very specific, almost fashionable use, just the same way that slang is fashionable and appears from nowhere then slides out of use. I think it's exactly the same thing. In fact, in some ways, emoji are just as expressive and difficult to characterize as any other language.

And speaking of other languages, people in different countries use emoji differently too. So the most popular one in one country may not be the most popular one in other countries. What are some of the interesting differences that you found when you're working on the book? I think one of the biggest differences was there's one particular paper that looked at exactly that. It looked at emoji use in different countries.

And it characterized emoji as kind of either positive or negative. Jeez, there were so many different ways. There were so many different axes in which they looked at particular emoji. But the one thing that stuck out with me was that basically every country in the world had face with tears of joy at the top of the list, apart from France, where it was a heart. And I thought that's quite apt. It feels like, you know, Paris is terribly romantic. France is terribly romantic. It feels appropriate that that was different.

I think there's a lot of other less exciting ones perhaps. And again, I think a lot of them come from

when emoji just kind of were imported. A good 700 emoji came out of Japan. And so they were vested with lots of cultural meaning. There are a whole pile of emoji that don't really make a lot of sense or not very useful if you're not Japanese. There's one called moon viewing ceremony, which is a particular holiday or particular observance in Japan that I think makes little sense unless you follow the Shinto religion, for example. There's another one which looks like, depending on how you look at it, either a pit in the ground with some

coming out of it or a plate of hot food. That's actually the Japanese cartographic symbol for hot springs or onsen. So there are some things which can be difficult to interpret just because they're unfamiliar. But then there are others like the poop emoji where it's pretty clear what it is. But just the word in Japan, which I think is unchi, I

kind of carries a connotation of luck or serendipity. So it doesn't have the same cultural meaning. The poop doesn't necessarily have as negative a meaning as it might do over here. But again, there are 3,800 emoji and it becomes really difficult, I think, to generalize about how things differ from one country to another. Yeah, yeah. Bringing up the hot springs one, that reminds me, one thing I didn't know that was so interesting in your book is that there are a few emoji that can be used in web addresses, right?

So the peace sign and that hot springs emoji, you can do peace sign.com and the hot springs emoji.com and they will take you to an actual webpage. I tried the peace one yesterday. I don't know for sure. Is that still true of the hot springs one? I think it is. I think all of this goes back to the Unicode consortium. It's in some ways,

both interesting and sort of depressing that all leads back to a bunch of people in a boardroom somewhere in California. Again, we talked earlier about how Zapf dingbats were just brought into emoji, sorry, brought into Unicode because it was popular. People used it a lot. And it turns out that some of these early symbols, like the peace symbol, before Unicode called them emoji, before Unicode had a notion of what emoji was, they already existed on our computers. We could still use them. And

And web addresses are administered in different jurisdictions around the world. And some of them said, yeah, you can have a web address with one of these custom symbols in it or one of these special characters in it if you like. I think it's been clamped down on now. So you can't really buy any new ones, I think, at the moment. And in fact, most of the ones that exist take you to a page that say, hey, you could buy this very distinctive domain name if you want. So they don't take you anywhere useful. They just take you to somewhere where you could pay lots of money to buy p-sign.com.

or whatever happens to be. Yeah, peace sign.com just went to something that was under construction. It wasn't an interesting webpage or anything, but, and yeah, yeah. You said in the book that like, you can't have a new one. It's just these sort of legacy ones. They existed. So now they have to keep existing and yeah, but it was fascinating. I had no idea. So, you know, wrapping up, you know, you wrote this whole book about emoji. So I consider you now, you know, one of the world experts on emoji. And I'm curious if the experience of writing the book

changed the way you think about them or changed the way you use them yourself? I think I'm maybe a bit of a stick in the mud. So I didn't use them very much beforehand. They were kind of an object of fascination. The Emoji book in some ways is a sequel to Shady Characters, my first book, which is all about unusual marks of punctuation. And

I think for a long time, this is a bit introspective, for a long time I was trying to figure out what I was writing about. I think it's weird forms of information technology. I think that's where I've landed. Emoji just seemed like the obvious place to go.

after finishing one of the books thinking what shall I do next and at the time I think it was this of the mid early early 2020s that's only five years ago I did I it feels like a lifetime um I I was looking for something to write about and it just seemed so obvious to write about them they were ubiquitous they were everywhere so I think if it's done anything I think it's given me quite an appreciation for the fact that there is this new facet of language it's really hard to think of a time where

in a span of, let's call it 25 years, we went from not having this form of language or this feature of language to a whole new set of characters, a whole new way of expressing ourselves. It's staggering. I mean, it's genuinely hard to think of anything else which had that effect. I asked the question on Twitter, I think, at the time. And I said, can anyone tell me what else has happened in the history of language like this? And

And it was things like, well, the invention of hieroglyphics. Hieroglyphics came out of nowhere in about 100 years.

And also the technology of writing, so papyrus, pen and ink and so on, all just arrived in this big bang in ancient Egypt. And I think someone else suggested Shakespeare. Shakespeare coined so many words in such a short period of time that he really changed the face of, or certainly expanded the face of the English language. And emoji maybe seems a bit heretical to mention emoji in the same breath as like hieroglyphics or Shakespeare, but I don't think it's unreasonable to,

to look at them in the same way. Yeah. Well, thank you, Keith Houston. The book is Face with Tears of Joy, which I'm relieved to hear that I'm not using wrong. Where can people find you, Keith? Well, my website is shadycharacters.co.uk and you can find me and all my books and all the other ways to reach me there.

Great. And we're going to talk about one of your other books. So for the main show, this is the end. But if you're a Grammarpalusian, if you support the show, we have a bonus segment for you coming up. Keith has another book called The Book that is about the technology of the book. And it's really fascinating. So we're going to talk about that next in the bonus segment. But for the rest of you, thanks for listening.

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