New Word Play
On the book, Face with tears of joy : a natural history of emoji
Emojis are an interesting form of exformation. The frequently used example of exformation is when Victor Hugo inquired with his publisher on the success of Les Miserables and used just a question mark "?"--and the publisher replied "!" They must have used smileys at the time [:( and🙂], but we don't know. It seems obvious they would see them as facial expressions. Typesetters certainly would have noticed them.
I know it's now an established language and a useful shortcut, but I seldom use them. Words are "emoji" enough and it's pointless to spend the time to search for the one that represents what you really want to say--as opposed to using them to be coy, ironic, or attempting to gaslight. My texts are typically short ,so the words are better than the pictures, and I'm not interested in being cutesy when I just want to communicate that I'll be late. Why bother placing a "running" emoji?
Ideally, emojis should be attached to the word as a search term or from its etymology; You shouldn't have to hunt for them and should be auto-filled. For example, any word with the prefix "auto" should autocorrect with an image of a car. In the program I'm now typing into (Evernote) I'm typing "car" and it placed a pic of a car, but not for "auto", so there should be some standardization of that. But I suppose that would take the fun out of them in terms of their capacity to be ironic.
Emojis are useful as a symbol for something you say repeatedly. If you send the same message to people several times a day, every day, why not reduce it to a symbol so you don't have to use the same sequence of words over and over?
"Emoji were born as visual symbols, and, aside from their workmanlike Unicode names, they have no direct verbal equivalents. Finally, can emoji constitute words used “in a structured and conventional way”? This is less clear cut. The rules and conventions that govern written languages are typically described in terms of orthography, which relates to how the language is written and how its words are spelled, and grammar, which describes how words are combined to make comprehensible clauses and sentences? Emoji has neither."
It's possible that emojis could be profoundly philosophical. It's just a matter of assigning meaning, or letting the meaning emerge from the context--just as we do with a cryptic poem or lyric. We have Emoji Dick and probably other prose composed of emoji, mostly as novelty and as an experiment to see what you can do with them as a medium or procedure--not unlike using an alternate tuning on a guitar. They are an interesting form of conceptual Text Art, to wit, how the hashtag #MeToo became #RiceBunny by way of the translation of "me too" to the Chinese equivalent"mi tu" as a form of algospeak. "Rice bunny" in Mandarin is pronounced "mi tu", so it's a marginal form of hashtag-emoji backronym.
Think Ed Ruscha making a painting with the words RICE BUNNY
The working title of this post was originally "Picture Music". The translation of that to emoji would be the emojis Mona Lisa and Treble Clef, which could become #MonaClef, which rhymes with "roman a clef"--so you can keep reiterating it as a form of recursion. Once lots of people use it, the new meaning is established. This is always the way languages have evolved--by incorporating popular slangs. It's interesting that emoji slang is a form of roman a clef (fact as fiction), so it's meta. That can become a meme as well by using Gray Beard+ Treble Clef as a variation of #MonaClef, or Mona Lisa + Clay, and so on. It can actually be a lot of fun, but also dangerous because it shreds meaning, and over time, people see it as being historical fact. (A good name for this wordplay: "Winkie" because it's always winking in some way.)
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What's particularly interesting about the book is that it's full of color inline emojis, and it must have been a tedious task to place them in the flow of the text. Each is essentially a sparkline ("sparklie"), but when I scanned some pages, they disintegrated into black blobs. They don't OCR, and LLMs don't parse them. Apparently, print news panned them because they look unserious and they don't print well, and they aren't standardized. This is because various platforms started making and selling them and were hugely profitable, but evaded any attempt at standardization.
The genesis of stickers were in the aftermath of the 2011 tsunami when people still had crude SMS, so a red cross and a pain-face emoji conveys that someone is in desperate need of help, and is in fact a form of exformation, but like hashtags, emojis became memes and create too many ironic layers of meaning, made popular with people like Cher with her rants against Trump.
Emoji Music
There are many variations or dialects of standard music notation, but few people use them often enough for them to be a standard orthography. Emojis have no associated sound, so they aren't really a language because they don't involve the lingual (tongue). But it would be interesting to have the capability in music notation software to use emojis as articulations and score expressions.
According to Quincy Jones, Ray Charles, who was his mentor, taught him how to write music from Braille. Charles used to transcribe Dizzy Gillespie songs in Braille.
My composition teacher, the late Bill Russo, had his Picture Music, which I really liked.
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- Discuss how music notation is a form of Information Design
- Discuss music notation
- Discuss exformation
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