Emojis: Technological Pictograms

On 29 October, the finalists for the 2024 Unicode emoji proposals were revealed. Some of the finalists were things that, frankly, I could swear we already had, such as a trombone or an orca. But one of the submissions was oddly specific — an “inflatable face” emoji, something that appears as if it were one small pin away from bursting. In fact, there is seemingly an emoji for everything (at least everything more common than inflatable faces). However, that wasn’t always the case.

Predating the Unicode emoji, emoticons were the closest thing to representing faces within text. Yet, they were perhaps not a modern invention as you may think. Though Robert Herrick’s apparent use of a smiley face in his 1628 poem ‘To Fortune’ — “Upon my ruins, (smiling yet :)” —  is likely nothing more than a mere oddity of punctuation, it is nonetheless pleasing to imagine seventeenth century poets sneaking emoticons into their work. When the emoticon really became a modern phenomenon, however, is in the twentieth century. Ambrose Bierce, famed short story writer who ought to be studied in greater detail by any budding literature student, satirically suggested the use of the “note of cachinnation,” a sideways bracket that indicated laughter, within his essay ‘For Brevity And Clarity’. Following on from prior typographical art, emoticons were mostly works of novelty to be used quickly and then disregarded.

As computers developed and became digital, and computer science became an ever-increasingly prominent field of study, ASCII emoticons emerged. The first known use of a digital smiley face was in a 1982 email sent by computer scientist Scott Fahlman, as a suggested icon to use when indicating jokes. After that email, the use of emoticons spread like digital wildfire. The 1990s further saw the release of the Wingdings font, which included a range of smiley faces, ordinary objects, and decorative fleurons. The Unicode emoji as we know it today thus emerged worldwide in 2010 following global demand for Japanese-style phone emojis. From that point on, countless new emojis have been introduced.

Now, emojis are numerous and persistent; no matter how hard you might try to ignore them, they inevitably force themselves into the forefront of media. Whether that be the (utterly banal, dreadful and god-awful) Emoji Movie, or the fact that the laughing crying emoji was the 2015 Oxford Word of the Year, emojis are inescapable. Much to the chagrin of those that denounce them as ‘cringe’, they are not going anywhere for the foreseeable future as they become even more deeply embedded within our modern culture.

What is most interesting, perhaps, is that through our use of emojis, language is usurped by image. Indeed, rather than an evolution of language as observed over the past centuries, where new words and meanings blossom from the fertile ground of language, emojis cast us back into a prehistoric past where we ascribe meanings to drawings. Slipping away from our communication, the abstract nature of language is being replaced, little by little, by the literal symbolism that emojis entail. Some reactionaries might see this as a fundamental threat to language and literature; in their eyes the perceived beauty and multiplicity of meanings of language face destruction. 

Though I hardly share that position. Firstly, emojis, though they are reminiscent of the petroglyphs of our ancestors, in no way detract from communication — rather, they enhance it, creating a new avenue to illustrate emotions succinctly, for instance. Secondly, even literary giants are partial to desiring them. Aside from Bierce’s admittedly sardonic remarks, Vladimir Nabokov himself imagined a sort of proto-emoji during a 1969 interview with The New York Times. In response to a question of how he would rank himself amongst writers, he remarked, “I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile — some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket, which I would now like to trace in reply.”

Certainly, there’s just something about a little smiling face that words cannot effectively grasp; a certain unique feeling is evoked by these technological pictograms. For something to usurp centuries-old language in the span of decades, it must have some unique ingenuity.

Illustration by Sandra Palazuelos Garcia