A Changing of the Guard: A Guest Post by Keith Houston
They’re as clear as words — clearer even — but where did they come from, and how did they get here? Keith Houston’s comprehensive exploration of the evolution of the emoji is a riveting read. Read on for an exclusive essay from Keith Houston on writing Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of the Emoji.
Paperback $19.99
Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji
Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji
In Stock Online
Paperback $19.99
A vibrant exploration of the world’s newest language—where it came from, how it works, and where it’s going.
A vibrant exploration of the world’s newest language—where it came from, how it works, and where it’s going.
My first book, Shady Characters, published in 2013, was about unusual marks of punctuation and similar symbols. The interrobang (‽), for instance, invented in 1962 by a Madison Avenue exec, which stands for a rhetorical or surprised question. (“You did what‽”) The inverted exclamation mark (¡), which sometimes stands for irony. The manicule (☞), or pointing hand, which medieval readers sketched in the margins to call out interesting passages of text. Even quotation marks (“”), which seemed mundane at first, had a two-thousand year history worth writing about. The ironic thing (‘¡’, remember?) was that even as I pored over those quirky little marks, a new kind of symbol was about to upend the written word.
It’s hard to say when emoji were invented, exactly, but they had been gathering momentum in Japan since the mid 1980s and were finally ready to debut on the world stage. First, in 2008, Google and then Apple made emoji available in their products. In 2010, emoji were added to the Unicode standard, which governs how computers exchange text (and which, for lovers of language, is a grimoire of forgotten and obscure characters). Then, in 2013, emoji went viral: Moby Dick was translated into emoji. The video for Katy Perry’s Roar was narrated by emoji-filled chat bubbles. The word “emoji” was added to the Oxford English Dictionary.
It felt like a changing of the guard: punctuation was how we used to add meaning to our words; now, emoji promised, or threatened, to displace it. The interrobang (⁉️), the irony mark (🙃), the manicule (👉) ✌️quotation marks✌️, and many others suddenly had vibrant emoji equivalents. Not to mention the hundreds of other emoji that defied translation into existing marks: ‘😂’, ‘💀’, ‘👾’, ‘💥’, ‘🐼’; take your pick. Were they words? Emotions? A kind of written body language? Something new altogether?
Somehow, though, I missed the boat. I saw all of this happening, but I didn’t join the dots. It wasn’t until a few years later that I started to research emoji in the same way as I had done with punctuation — diving into their meanings, pulling apart their conflicting origin stories, understanding how they interact with our words — and I realised that I had accidentally started to write another book. But things were different this time round.
First, punctuation thrived on paper but emoji, of course, are digital natives. For my research, I exchanged the reading room at the National Library of Scotland for a web browser. archive.org in particular was indispensable, acting as a sort of library for the web. (That weird old website you half-remember from the late ’90s? Trust me, it’s there.)
Second, many of the actors in emoji’s story were still alive to tell their part of it. I interviewed software engineers, emoji experts, Japanologists, graphic designers, and others, all of which helped me to piece together emoji’s half-told history. Along with that welcome new source of information, though, came a responsibility to be as fair as possible to those same people. It’s easy to be glib about someone’s part in history when they have been dead for centuries or even millennia; less so when you have just spoken to them on Zoom.
Lastly, I had to make my peace with the fact that I could never tell emoji’s whole story. Emoji are still evolving, and so is our understanding of them: I was still adding crucial new pieces of information to the book as my deadline approached. Even the Unicode Consortium, which decides the contents of the yearly “emoji season” of new symbols, has not quite worked out what it wants emoji to in the long run. We may see an explosion of new emoji, or we may not. They may become more common, or they may die out. Right now, no-one really knows — which, when you just have finished writing a book on emoji, is an exhilarating and discombobulating thing to realise.