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Posted Jan 3, 2022 4:15 UTC (Mon) by felixfix (subscriber, #242)
In reply to: The fast kernel headers tree by pebolle
Parent article: The fast kernel headers tree

Many systems turn text emojis like colon dash close-paren into gifs. Let's find out if that is the case here.

:-)

Emojis began in the text world, probably on typewriters, and I say WE TAKE BACK OUR EMOJIS!!!!

The fast kernel headers tree

Posted Jan 3, 2022 8:21 UTC (Mon) by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604) [Link]

Let's do one better and convert all gifs back to text.

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Posted Jan 3, 2022 8:31 UTC (Mon) by Karellen (subscriber, #67644) [Link] (14 responses)

"text emojis" - we already have the word "emoticons" which predates "emojis" (in English) by at least 5 years. And they can pry my emoticons off of my cold, dead keyboard!!!! Or something.

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Posted Jan 3, 2022 17:42 UTC (Mon) by EnigmaticSeraph (subscriber, #50582) [Link] (12 responses)

While I understand the sentiment, Emojis are far better than emoticons. For example, screen readers for the blind cannot interpret emoticons, but Emoji are fine. To be inclusive, we should really move past emoticons.

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Posted Jan 3, 2022 18:20 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (9 responses)

Are you *trying* to us exclude dinosaurs!?

I won't say I use emoticons much, but I don't use emojis AT ALL. I neither know, nor care, how to ... :-)

Cheers,
Wol

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Posted Jan 3, 2022 21:04 UTC (Mon) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (8 responses)

Wikipedia claims the following:

> Mary Kalantzis and Bill Cope write that the first digital emojis were created by Bruce Parello, a student at the University of Illinois, on PLATO IV, the first e-learning system, in 1972.

It cites a book as well as this open-access PDF: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/351400910_A_Litt...

If that year is correct, then it would predate the introduction of (digital) emoticons in 1982 by a full ten years (although Wikipedia again claims that emoticons have appeared in non-digital text as early as 1648).

However, there are a few caveats here:

1. To the best of my understanding, these emoji did not get incorporated into Unicode and therefore lack historical continuity with modern emoji.
2. The PLATO emoji can't have been very influential, because everybody and their dog incorrectly claims that Shigetaka Kurita created the first emoji in 1999.

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Posted Jan 4, 2022 1:48 UTC (Tue) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841) [Link] (7 responses)

I'm not sure that implementing a custom character on a PLATO system counts as "creating an emoji" as that would commonly be understood now. PLATO used a vector display; any arbitrary shape could be defined, used, and reused. The same was true for the PDP/PDS-IMLAC terminals of that same era. My first summer job project back in 1971 involved teaching an PDP+IMLAC system to draw logic diagrams, and that started with creating a library of routines to draw individual logic gates (AND NOR XOR ...) essentially as reusable custom characters. Those were 絵文字 (emoji) in the literal sense of being "picture (絵) characters (文字)" but obviously not in the current social media sense of "punctuation marks conveying emotion".

On the other hand, I concede that if Bruce Parello's PLATO emoji were promoted for use by students or instructors as markup annotations for PLATO assignments, they might qualify under the modern sense of emoji as well as under the original technical sense.

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Posted Jan 4, 2022 22:20 UTC (Tue) by EnigmaticSeraph (subscriber, #50582) [Link] (6 responses)

I just wanted to say that I strongly appreciate the diversity of generations and experiences from LWN. It yields much richer results, solutions, evolutions, etc. Thanks, comrades.

While I'm dropping by, a further argument for emoji is that they express a broad and at times deep sets of readily-understood signifiers independent of language or ultimately medium; yes, the Unicode repertoire remains e.g. Euro & Japanese -centric, but it's getting better.

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Posted Jan 5, 2022 3:57 UTC (Wed) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (5 responses)

I would argue that emoji are far less universal than people have claimed. For example:

😂 is in practice almost entirely synonymous with "lol," but its official Unicode name is FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY.
😤 is FACE WITH LOOK OF TRIUMPH but most westerners understand it to mean something like "I'm angry."
💅 is generally understood to express casual insouciance, but it literally depicts a person painting their nails.
💁‍♀️ and to some extent 💁‍♂️ are used to express sarcasm or snark, but they are officially an INFORMATION DESK PERSON (followed by a ZWJ and a gender marker), and some people incorrectly(?) call it the "hair flip emoji." It's not at all obvious to me what these emoji-people are supposed to be doing, but "person tipping hand" seems to be the modern-ish name for them.
👌 as a hand gesture is already quite ambiguous even before you turn it into an emoji. Some cultures think it means "OK," and some think it's vulgar.
There are emoji* for each national flag, but they don't even work on Windows. But they do work on Twitter, and any other platform that does their own custom emoji rendering rather than handing Unicode directly to the browser like a sensible website.

And those are the clean ones. I could go on all day about the dirty ones...

* The flags are not directly mapped in Unicode. Instead, Unicode defines 26 "regional indicator symbols" and you spell out the two-letter ISO code for the country whose flag you want. This is because the Unicode stability policy would be incompatible with adding and removing flags as countries rise and fall. Also, there are a wide variety of political and cultural issues which would make this fraught to do in Unicode (e.g. there is no consensus on whether TW should display the flag of Taiwan - it is a valid ISO 3166-1 code, but ISO also has codes for Puerto Rico, Antarctica, and a variety of other "non-independent" territories, which is the same category they put Taiwan under).

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Posted Jan 5, 2022 6:47 UTC (Wed) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link] (2 responses)

This comment confirms something that I'd been suspecting. Emoji often are too small for those of us with imperfect sight.
I can read all your words just fine (with the correct glasses).
I can see the first two emoji look like faces and are different, but I wouldn't trust my guess as to the important difference.

I don't much like emoji, but I can say one thing in their favour: they are still much better than animated emoji.

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Posted Jan 5, 2022 7:46 UTC (Wed) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841) [Link] (1 responses)

Well, the "characters are too small for these old eyes" problem is not limited to emoji. CJK glyphs with more than about 6 strokes start to become hard to distinguish at font sizes for which the English alphabet is perfectly legible. Of course context and familiarity help a lot, but even so I resort to toggling ever increased font size. And I can only dream wistfully of being able to read much of anything on a phone screen.

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Posted Jan 5, 2022 9:24 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

To be fair, you can afford to increase the font size for CJK glyphs since they are so dense. A typical Mandarin word is just 1.6 characters long.

And they're also so much easier to type on a phone!

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Posted Jan 5, 2022 15:26 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Sure. Words change meaning over time too. Given that there's unlikely to be specific codepoints for what some food emoji[1] "mean" in typical usage, what do you suggest people use instead when they want to talk about…whatever they're talking about. They're going to use the tools available. Language is flexible like that.

- 😂 is "lol", sure. People have tears when laughing. I consider it more like "rofl", but it's in the same vein at least.
- 😤 is ambiguous in that the whisps could be going in (sure, "triumph" could work here though the eyes or eyebrows don't match what I'd expect) or out ("angry, but counting to ten").
- 💅 is depicting one of the things that someone expressing casual insouciance would do instead of fully paying attention to what you're saying or doing. I don't see an issue here; it's actually quite ingenious.
- 💁‍♀️ and 💁‍♂️ are fine for sarcasm (IME, in a "sorry not sorry" kind of way). I don't expect ‽ and ⸮ to be any more useful given the difficulty of finding them on keyboards compared to the emoji. Info desks aren't that common anymore anyways (at least in the US; I don't expect COVID to have made them more popular where they still exist with humans behind the desk instead of touch screen based phone tree-like kiosks), so repurposing existing codepoints is useful.
- 👌 Sure, and 🖕 exists too. What's your point? One can't say that Unicode refuses to make vulgar symbols for any one culture at least (government prudishness and pearl clutching is a different matter).

[1] 🍆 and 🍑

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Posted Jan 5, 2022 19:15 UTC (Wed) by mbunkus (subscriber, #87248) [Link]

Emojis mirror real life. In real life different people use different gestures to signal the same thought or feeling (e.g. one might fist pump in triumph, someone else might raise their hands Rocky-style, yet another one might stand there in the typical superhero pose). The inverse is also true: the same gesture might mean different things to different people or even the same person (the aforementioned superhero pose might also be taken as an angry parent berating their misbehaving child, depending on the facial expression). And lastly, a lot of gestures or sayings aren't globally used (e.g. "crossing your fingers" in English has an Emoji that doesn't make sense to us Germans who use "Daumen drücken" = squeezing your thumb as the corresponding saying, and there's no Emoji for that, so either we know the English equivalent and use that one ore we're simply out of luck).

As ambiguous real life is, you cannot make they pictograms trying to represent them unambiguous.

Same as any other piece of language, really, 'cause that's all Emojis are, a type of language we can use or not along the other types of language (spoken, written, body language, images, dance…). NONE of that is unambiguous. Of course the Unicode people know that; of course they don't expect Emojis to be universal.

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Posted Jan 3, 2022 20:50 UTC (Mon) by KJ7RRV (subscriber, #153595) [Link] (1 responses)

How hard would it be to create a font that shows emojis as emoticons? That, combined with existing emoticon-to-emoji converters, should make everyone happy.

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Posted Jan 3, 2022 20:54 UTC (Mon) by KJ7RRV (subscriber, #153595) [Link]

A browser extension would also work for Web sites (and any chat platforms accessed through a browser, as well as Web mail); that way it would actually be emoticons and not just look like them. An IRC bouncer could do the same for IRC.

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Posted Jan 4, 2022 3:19 UTC (Tue) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

The "☺" in most DOS codepages predates Unicode by a few decades too...