Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to stuff you should know from how Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh
Clark with Charles W. Smiley Faced Bryant and Jerry party
face rolling. I got no emoji. I'm just Josh wink face. Sure,
(00:23):
eggplant and peach. Whoa, I know that's dirty, but you
can say eggplant and peach and get away with it
even on the team. Sounds like a the lightful meal.
It does. Actually it doesn't at all, but not at all.
It is cute for sure. I use the bitmoji now
some some which I see is not even in this research.
(00:43):
So I just thought to throw it out there early.
I want to go on record as saying that my
bit mooji is one of the best, because I'm honest,
even do a bit moji? Do you even have that? Sure?
I've going okay, because you know, you design your own thing.
So I found that a lot of people's bitmoji's aren't
very honest. You mean, the the the image of the person.
(01:07):
I said, you know, I got a little chubby bearded guy,
and every time I sent it to someone there like,
oh my god, that looks just like you. And I
said yeah, because I'm honest, I didn't make myself a supermodel.
I got you. I got you. I thought you meant
you were just like like you'd say like I don't
like that and mean it kind of thing. Now, I
don't know if I've ever sent you a bit moji,
so I'm gonna do that right now. I don't think
(01:27):
you have checked in real time. What do you want? Uh?
You want me on an elephant? Yes? Or me crying
in the rain because you're not near me. Can you
cry in the rain on an elephant? I don't think
I can bind either. One's fine, elephant, we'll do elephant.
I love elephants. Well, I can't find the elephant now,
so I'll diploy you a kiss. Okay, So what we're
(01:51):
talking about today are not bit mooji's, although they would
qualify as a sub type of this, I guess. But
they use a lot of words. It's kind of like
when you're playing charades and somebody's like, that's close. That's close.
It's like you can't talk, man, you have to just
shut up. You have to charade it. That's the difference
between bit mooji and emoji, and emoji is really what
(02:14):
we're talking about today, which is a pictograph basically like, um,
a hieroglyph okay, but it's a modern hieroglyphic. Yeah. And
I will also go on record as saying I don't
really use emojis anymore because of the bit moji um
(02:35):
and I don't use them that often, but it's always
funny to send a bit moji to someone, like kind
of go out on a limb and be like, should
I send this? And then you get one back? Like
I remember the first time I bit moji Hodgeman. I
thought he's gonna think I'm just so stupid, and he
sent one right back. He's on the bitmoji train. I
can buy that for sure. But I don't use the
(02:58):
emoji as much anymore. But I did when they when
I I guess they first kind of hit the scene
on the smartphone. Um, and now I get a little
I mean, kissy faces and stuff are fine, but I
don't like when I just get like a thumbs up
reply for okay, that's fine, or thumbs up is almost
like I can barely tolerate you. Yeah, that's what it
(03:19):
feels like to me. That's what they're saying. I can't
be bothered to type okay, Right, I say k K
because it really kind of takes okay and and turns
it even more personal. I always thought you were just
jittery admitt to type k and just said it. No,
I'm saying kak. So now you have legendarily fast thumbs.
I do. It's from all the coffee I drink and
(03:41):
the speed. I will also say this that this article,
and I mean I kind of picked it because well,
I'm gonna be honest, we needed something a little easier
this week because it's a tough week. This is a
little more in depth than you may have thought, more
in depth and like way more interesting than I thought.
The whole history of it I thought was pretty fascinating.
So let's talk about the history of it. Man. The
the widely agreed upon start date for emojis comes back
(04:08):
in Night two, all the way back in two. And
it wasn't an emoji that first came out. It was
what are known as emoticons, the predecessor of emoji. Remember
those days, And we're all just big dummies and type
colin parentheses on a way. It wouldn't mean that that'd
be that's not even a thing. Yeah, colin parentheses is
(04:31):
smiley face. I was thinking quotations. Sorry, yeah, right, So
colon in a parentheses either way is a smiley face
or a frownie face. And that we can point to.
This is so cool that that they know who did this.
But a guy named um uh Scott Falman, and he
(04:52):
was either an admin or a frequent user or whatever
had something to do with the message board, the electronic
message board UM which was a very very early like
chat room forum prototype back in two for Carnegie Mellon University. Yeah,
which we did some time there. We served out of
(05:13):
sentence there, we did. Now we did a little uh,
a little short video Carnegie Mellon for days. Yeah, short
video for days. But yeah two he uh and I
don't even know if you said specifically, but September nineteenth.
They actually have the actual date, which is amazing. And
he said on this bulletin board, if you put a
smiley face using this actually he even gus seated up
(05:36):
with the dashes the nose that they lost the dash
pretty quick. I like the dash, do you it gets overdone?
Do you know what I like? It's like it's a
horse face. What I like her? The people that are
can do like a whole picture out of typing things?
Oh yeah, like the Shrug Guy. Yeah that's no, no, no,
(05:57):
I mean like this whole page would be a big rooster.
It's like the kids and me, you and everyone we know.
Yeah exactly. They had like the Book of Them that
was the cutest touch. Yeah, good movie. That is the
one movie that has ever done whimsy right and didn't
go over the edge. It was whimsical to an exactly perfect,
(06:21):
non annoying degree. So every other movie with whimsy you hate, yes, okay,
like hate. I do like Shrug Guy, though Shrug Guy,
I've never learned it just copy and paste him. Well,
I've never done it myself, but I just like the
way it looks. And I thought that's creative because it
looks exactly like what it is. Um And I was
always partial to as well to the awkward which was
(06:44):
which was that Colin slash. Oh that one's kind of
makes feelings about because it can also mean like wow,
I'm really disappointed, or it's like sure it means that's
why I like it. I think very versatile. It is versatile.
There's a lot to it, all right. So anyway, he said,
if he used a smiley face with a colon and
that dash in parentheses in your comment to say it's humorous,
(07:07):
then I think we can avoid it was kind of
used to clear up like the ambiguity of text and
things like that, not texting, but you know, sometimes it's
hard to read, like wait, does this person making a joke? Right? Right?
So if somebody was joking or being sarcastic, yeah, like
he used this thing, you right, and then the person
will know and we won't have an argument on the
(07:29):
message board because the person will know you were joking, right, Yeah.
And it started in and what as we'll see. What
Falman hit on the head was the very point that
emojis fulfill, which is they add context to plain text,
which is important. Yeah. So um, Falman came up with
(07:50):
his triumphant victory, like you said, September nineteen, and now
he's sitting on a mountain of cash and oh yeah, man,
he trademarked it very wisely. So hope everybody's sending him
the money in the time they used that emoticon, but
before him and I thought this was super interesting. People
have always, of course put little smiley faces and letters
(08:11):
and things like that. So this was an extension of that.
But um, some historians say in Robert Herrick wrote a
poem entitled to Fortune, and it seems as if he
is purposely included an emoticon in a line upon my
ruins smiling Yet and he puts a colon in a
(08:33):
parentheses after the words smiling, And people say that may
have actually been the very first use of this. I
read the little article that had that, and there was
a um. There was a note in addendum and appendage,
if you will, basically said and it was from an
(08:53):
English professor who said that at this time, in what
sixt in the mid seventeenth century, there was no no
standardized punctuation, and so even a poet writing something sending
it off to the printer would not necessarily expect the
printer to follow his punctuation to a t. I think
it's a bit of a lame explanation. Why even go
(09:15):
to the trouble. Maybe maybe this professor was saying the
printer himself could have added this, and that it wasn't
the poet's intent, and that it was just accidental. I'm
not sure. I like to think that. Yeah, this guy
had a tremendous amount of foresight and and in sixty
Robert Herrick said, here's your first emoticon. Everybody, come back
(09:39):
and find me in two thousand twelve. I'm gonna go
with that story. Okay, that's where we're going with. So
we had the emoticon either beginning in six or definitely
beginning in nine two, and that's all we had to
deal with for a good thirteen years if it was
the latter UM. And then in we finally get our
(10:00):
first emojis, and we know where those came from too,
and believe it or not, everybody, they came from Japan.
I don't no surprise, right right. It was a company
called n T t uh D Little Low Big Seed,
Little low M Little Low Como. We're gonna call it
DoCoMo because that's what it spells. And they had to
(10:20):
icons a phone and a heart. And this is when
people um had pagers beepers. Did you ever have a pager? Tons?
Did you really? You had like two or three at
a time, depending on you know, what you needed. I
don't think I maybe I did. I think when I
(10:41):
got into the film business, I had to get a pager.
But it was very very soon after that my first,
like Nokia phone came into play. I didn't have a
pager for years and years. I didn't had a page
of like a year, if I remember correctly. Yeah, I
mean they were for those of you, for you kids
out there. There's probably plenty of kids who listen to
(11:02):
us to have no idea what a page is, all right,
It's like a little a little I guess digital thing
that was like the size of it was like the
size of a cigarette pack. But you guys all vape,
you don't smoke cigarettes. It was smaller than that. Okay,
it was the size of I don't even know what
it was, the size of a very tiny cell phone.
(11:22):
I guess we could say inches. It was about like
two inches by an inch and a half, which is
some unknown amount of centimeters, right. But it was a
very small little box and you carried it with you
and clip that you could put on your belt. It
was a magic little box because somebody would call a
number that was associated with your pager and they would
like type in their phone number after the beep and
(11:44):
hang up or press pound I think afterwards. Then you
hang up and then you got a little alert on
that little thing you wore on your belt. Then it
would be like bee. It was very annoying, and the
person's number would be next to it, and if they
really needed to talk to you, they put nine on
one after. So you would then pull your car over,
find a pay phone, call the number on your pager
(12:06):
and say you got the stuff. I'd be like, what's up?
What's so important? Right? Yeah, that was how people communicate
with one another before cell phones. It's really it seems
like a hundred years ago, and it's really funny that
it was the mid nineties, right, and then people said, well,
why don't we just make phones more portable? And they're like, oh,
that's actually had thought about that, good idea, because I
(12:27):
mean you had that bag phones and car phones at
the time. It was a thing. So the the Japanese,
the entire country of Japan had pagers in the early nineties.
They were early adopters. Yeah for sure, and um this
DoCoMo uh. They had a line called Pocketbell Pagers and
they were the ones that first added emojis. There was
a heart and a phone. Yeah. The phone meant call
(12:49):
me the heart very sweetly. I love that. The heart
was one of the first ones basically sending a message
of love. Uh. And then later on in the nineties,
late nineties, I guess they streamline streamline that got rid
of those icons because apparently uh pocket Bell pagers with
a lot of business people that used them, and they
weren't into it. So the teenagers were like, forget you, then, DoCoMo,
(13:13):
we're out of here. We're going to Tokyo messaging because
they've got these little what would eventually be called emoji's.
I love that that. Um, the docmo like they got
all business like. They were like, we can't have the
heart on there. Yeah. Um, that reminds me of probably
my favorite Onion headline of all time. Man accidentally ends
(13:34):
business call with I love you the greatest one ever.
That's a good one. My favorite was always Drugs Win
War on Drugs. Oh yeah, did you see the video
they made with I think Little Wayne. But they were
saying the d e A Had tapped Little Wayne to
go like carry out the war on drugs by doing
all the drugs. Well just to picture of his face,
(13:58):
yeah right, yeah, but they would they use like clips
of him like on a on his tour of us
trying to talk but he's just so waste. He's not
even making sense, and but they clipped, they interspersed it
in like it was a news report, and he was
doing a great job. It's funny too. After our ten
years of doing this, we've gotten to do so many
cool things because of the show. And one of my
(14:18):
favorite things ever still is that when we knew people
at the Onion, they took my picture one day and
they'll still trot that out as Aria man and I
will be My mug will be in an Onion article
every now, and it's because area man. Yes, shout out
Joe Randazzo for there. Yeah, back in the day, getting
us in the office. All right, so should we take
(14:39):
a break. Oh god, we haven't yet, haven't we. Now,
let's take a break and we'll be back to talk
about where they went with Dokomo right for this? All right? Man?
(15:07):
So DoCoMo said we're done with you kids, and then
they said, oh wait, god, come back, you're like a
third of our business. We had no idea. Um, Luckily
they had an engineer named Shiga Takakura. You're really good
at the Japan much. I'm around it a lot, and
uh I guess coud tasan Okay, we'll go with that
(15:31):
he was working on a mobile internet platform called i Mode,
and he said, you know what, we're just trying to
get some pretty basic thoughts across here, like on a
on like a mobile network, so like your phone, stuff
like the news or the weather or something like that.
Headlines literally had news headlines and what the stock markets doing,
(15:53):
or if it's sunny out so right, right, and stuff
that's going to like repeat on like pretty predictable over
like fairly short time scale. So it's gonna be sunny
this day, and it's probably going to be sunny again,
so you're gonna go back to the sunny thing over
and over again rather than you know, typing out sunny.
What if he just had an icon of a son, right,
(16:14):
And this is a huge breakthrough. And what this guy
did was create the very first emojis for this imode platform.
And he actually coined the term emoji two shigy taka kurita,
that's right, uh. And there was a character e limit,
a two character limit, which is kind of the main
reason behind why we have emojis as good. So, like
you said, he didn't have to type out sunny. You
(16:35):
could use one character uh. And in nine it sounded
like the future back then. Remember it's crazy. Um he
developed a hundred and seventy six of these initial emoticons
for things dealing with the weather, sports, food and drink,
(16:56):
love of course, and like you said, he made up
the word E which was a picture emoji, which was
character and that's where it comes from. Yep. So the
thing was then you had how many did he come
up with? Two hundred seventy six initial ones? Okay? Um,
so the thing is is this this whole mobile platform
(17:16):
I mode and again this is we're talking about. Um.
They they had like two fifty characters tops. But these
broadband networks weren't invented yet. This was all like really
low fi stuff still, so it was very much ahead
of his time, so he kind of had to reverse
engineer how to get these things across. They had a
(17:37):
stroke of genius since there was a finite number of
these things. Rather than sending a picture from one phone
to another when one user wanted to send that emoji,
they stored the pictures in the phone and then you
could activate those emojis from a simple too to alpha
too I guess to bite alpha numeric code. So when
(18:01):
your phone got the right alpha numeric code. It would
produce a smiley face. Yeah. It really set the stage
for what we have today. Yeah, you know, yeah, yeah.
Umi was over there at this time. She was in
Japan teaching and she told me, like, you know, I
came back and I was like, wait, we're not We
don't have texts, like everybody texts. You don't have Hello
(18:22):
Kitty right exactly. And it was like years before, Like
Japan was definitely doing this fairly early compared to us here. Yeah.
I remember seeing, um, the first handheld cell phone that
wasn't the big brick phone. I saw one of those
in l a in the in the late eighties or
early nineties, like on a literally in a Hollywood backlot,
(18:45):
some producer had a brick phone, Like, oh my god.
But the first I kind of cell phone cell phone
I ever saw was in London, and I guess it
would have had to have been ninety five or ninety six,
and I had never seen one. Was like the big
rectangle with the flip down mouthpiece and the pull up
antenna something like that. It may not have had to
(19:07):
flip down, but it was, you know, it was smaller
than a brick phone. Um, but I just remember thinking
a while, like London, that they're on the leading edge
of technology here. I've never seen that before. What in
the world's that guy doing? Let me see that thing?
All right? So many years passed more they called them.
(19:29):
I don't even know how much they called them emojis
or icons back then. Probably well now the guy had
coined the term emoji, yeah, but I just don't know
if it was like the popular term at the time.
I see, I think it was Japan. Okay. Yeah, again,
ahead of the ahead of the thing, ahead of the curve. Yeah,
I just want to make sure that that's been gotten
across very much ahead of the all right. In two
thousand ten, a company called Unicode Consortium, well it wasn't
(19:52):
a company, it was the Unicode Consortium or a nonprofit
and they are a group of tech companies and volunteers
from the tech industry that basically really understood this stuff.
Saw the writing on the wall with the emoji on
the wall and where it was going, and they says,
why don't we do this. We need to create a library.
(20:13):
It needs to be standardized. Because I even remember early
on with smartphones, you know, different platforms, someone would send
you an emote, an emoji from an Android to an iPhone,
it wouldn't come across. So they said, we need to
standardize this so it can operate across all iOS devices. Yeah,
or even if like the phones had the same emojis,
(20:33):
they might not use the same codes, so you might
get like the opposite of what you're looking for. You're
looking for a peach and you get a big right exactly,
and they're like, wow, are you trying to say? Man?
So there was there was this great need for uniformity,
but it didn't come out until what what year was
the two So this Unicode Consortium and the Daily Mail
(20:55):
by the way, called it the Unicorn Consortium if you noticed,
and I called it the Unicode Consortium either way? Can
you pronounce it both ways? I think the Brits do that.
And that's when you saw your first cell phone, so
full circle. Yeah. So, um, Unicode got together and they
said we're gonna we're gonna make this this like collective,
open source, nonprofit effort to encode these things and create
(21:17):
a universal standard. And in doing so they've made what
some people point to is we'll see as one of
the first universal languages. Yeah. And also but it's not
really um. Strangely, it's it shocked me to know that
no one owns this. I love that there is no
(21:40):
patent or i P property rights to emojis. That it's great,
but it's it's kind of shocking that something so ubiquitous
some like no one's making money off of it. I
love that it's wonderful and rare and so rare. That's
why it's shocking them. It is now. Um, we should
say that some people point to the Unicode Consortium being
(22:04):
uh dominated by some major major companies. I think Google
and Apple really have a lot of people in there.
But again it's a nonprofit group and there are rules
that are followed. I think the implication is is that
there if Google or Apple puts up some suggestions, which
they do sometimes, they may have a little more likelihood
(22:27):
of getting past than other people's emojis. Maybe probably uh.
And then also since they're both American companies, the universal
set of emojis tend to skew a little more American.
Like hot dogs and hamburgers and French fries are there,
and now they're just now starting to get to like
euros and things like that. Those are not too huge
(22:48):
downfalls in return for this thing being open source and
unowned by anybody except for the entire world, right. But
one huge downfall because it's open source and anyone can
do anything with these emojis is that we got the
Emoji movie because some Hollywood executive was like, well, we
don't have to pay for this. We can just go
out and make a movie. Will be the first one
(23:10):
with an emoji movie, and since we don't have to
pay for it, we can put all of that money
into making something really great, and they did. I I
didn't see it, obviously, but I remember when it was
announced there would be an emoji movie. I just remember thinking,
come on, well, it really delivered on on that reaction.
(23:31):
From what I understand, I mean think it was a
bomb in all respects, but they still made like four
times what they put into I think the box off
million and they spent like fifty million on it. I
don't know, but I will say this, I have no
idea what it's about at all, but I know but
my prediction, having not seen it or read anything about it,
(23:53):
is that it was some dumb story about the different
emotions coming together in the end to solve some problem.
I'm sure you're right. I'm sure Hugh Jackman was in it,
and Jared from Subway was beaten up by a bunch
of people. Yeah, and then there was a Sharknado. Although, um,
the one of the guys who used to be on
Silicon Valley, t J. Mitchell, J. Miller, Miller, he was
(24:17):
in it. And so I was looking up the Emoji
movie and he apparently is accused of making a bomb. Man,
I saw that. Isn't that crazy? Yeah? He I don't
I don't know how he's doing. That article made me
worry for him. He I think he got in some
argument on a train with a lady and then and
then was taken off the train and called in a
bomb threat on the train that she had a bomb
(24:40):
and you can't you can't do that, allegedly allegedly allegedly,
yeah you can't do that, t J. Miller, that you
really can't, man. But yeah, I lay all this at
the feet of the Emoji movie because he was the
star of absolutely what was he uh see the egg
plan of the Peach? I don't know. Well, if he
was the star, then he probably would have been crying
(25:02):
with laughter because in two thousand seventeen. I believe for
three straight years US fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen, crying with
laughter was the most popular emoji, which I have issue
with that, and in two thousand fifteen it was Actually
this is what I have a problem with. Oxford Dictionary
chose it is the word of the year. I don't
(25:24):
have a problem with that part. Yeah, that shows Oxford
Dictionary is keeping up with with the ever evolving language.
Their descriptive ist not prescriptive ist. All right, that makes
him a okay in my book, So what's your problem?
My problem is that that means that crying with laughter
is overused. None of the people maybe one hundreds of
one percent of the people who sent the crying with
(25:47):
laughter emoji actually crying with laughter over like laugh out loud?
How many people are like l o ol, Like that's
not that's not what that means. Everybody, you ruined it.
You ruined laughing out loud, and you're ruin in the crying.
So you're saying, literally, if you're crying with laughter, is
the only time you can send that, not just saying
hey that's really funny. Yes, all right, I think it
(26:10):
would it would be a much better world if that
were the case. Okay, I just think it's overused, and
I think that's part of the I think that's one
reason why everybody is so cynical and sarcastic, is because
they're so out of touch with our emotions that we
have the similatroom to stand in for us that instead
of actually experiencing them, and everything has to be so
much bigger and bolder than it actually is. There's no
(26:32):
subtlety your nuance, which is ironic because there's tons of
subtlety and nuance in actually communicating with emoji, right, I
mean there's like a medium laughter emoticon probably right, I'm
sure probably. But it's the same thing is using exclamation points.
You get trapped in it, you know what I'm saying, So, like,
all of a sudden, if you take away the exclamation points,
people are like, are you mad at me? What's wrong?
(26:54):
I've definitely gotten in texts exchanges like hey, do you
want to go do this thing or whatever? And if
someone sends back, sure you do that, or yeah, you
do that a lot. If you just send back sure,
it's like, well, I guess Chuck's not very happy about this.
I guess I'll start adding exclamation points. No, but you
(27:18):
shouldn't have to, is my point. You should not have to,
and I think we just need to rip the band
aid off. I don't ever want to see an exclamation
point for you again that you don't mean much less
of double. The one that really is unsettling, though, was
when when somebody replies with sure period and the s
is lower case, that means that means things are not
going well? Right? Then sure? Yeah? Don't You don't want
(27:41):
me to be a funny because when I say sure,
I mean sure, but that's how I say it my head.
But I guess lower case sure period is definitely that's
saying something. Adding the period onto a lower case word,
you're sending a message. But if you're not, if you're
just saying sure like normally, that that's the problem Bloom
with with text based um communication. It lacks context, that
(28:06):
lacks emotion. So we're used to communicate any kind of
text base. Yeah, that's what I'm saying, like, just just
let right that. You have to add some sort of punctuation.
That's the role that emojis fulfill. And we'll talk about
that after a break. How about that sure lower case period. Alright,
(28:41):
so we'll go over some interesting stats here of people
use emojis online. What that's a that's almost everybody, surprising, Yeah,
and the other eight percent, I don't know. The other
eight percent have their arms folding. They're like, I'm not
gonna do it, darn it. That's right. Uh, we've been
(29:05):
dancing around this peach in the eggplant thing long enough.
Are we getting there now? Well we might as well.
So these have famously become uh stand ins for body parts, right,
like the peaches, like the Almon brothers sense of the words,
so what they meant? Yeah, I never really thought about that.
Oh yeah, eat a peach. Huh. All right, so it
(29:30):
soon became a thing to send a peach with an eggplant.
I am so old and out of that loop that
I didn't know this was a real thing. I didn't
either until um this article, and I was like, oh yeah, obviously,
especially after reading about it, I'm like, then you look
at the egg plane, You're like, um. Another uh famous
(29:58):
emoji is the poop i con. It's one of the
most ubiquitous, very popular in Japan and has become huge
in Japan popular in America with its fun little googly eyes,
And I think didn't Google even have flies buzzing around
the poop the first poop, which was a little much, frankly,
(30:18):
but yeah, I think back in like two thousand eight
or something like that, Google came out with their their
own poop icon for Gmail two seven and they put
flies around and it was just gross, um, but they
it's since somebody added the Google eyes later on and
now it's like a mascot the poop. The poop emoji
(30:39):
without the eyes is like gross, Like, what's wrong with you?
Why would you send that? It's like sure, period, right right?
But the poop with Google eyes is like sure exclamation
point right, Okay, I think you're right. I'm following along. Uh.
And there's been a lot of kind of um I
would call them folk controversies over the years, like last
(30:59):
just last year, Goal in two thousand seventeen had a
cheeseburger icon that had the cheese under the meat patty
and people went berserk. That's really stupid that people went berserk,
But it's also stupid to put the cheese under the meat. Yeah,
it's just a weird choice. Did that. It's some the
person who make that never see a cheeseburger before. It's
a really ducking stupid thing to do. But if it
(31:23):
was somebody who really had never seen a cheeseburger before,
then God bless them, and I feel bad for him
for the outrage they created. Because even if even if
they put the bun on upside down, even if they'd
left off the ketchup, okay, it doesn't matter, it still
looks like a cheeseburger. Settle down. Sometimes I wonder if
(31:44):
they do that, some of that stuff that these programmers
or designers or coders or whoever does these they do
that on purpose, just to rib people like, I'm gonna
put the cheese. Yeah, We're going to set the internetut,
And they did. Apparently the CEO of go goal Um,
I did not know that this was the CEO of
Google sundar Okay, he said, we are going to drop
(32:07):
everything else we are doing to go sort this out. Yeah,
I imagined fairly sarcastically. I would think so sarcastic emoticon, right,
whatever that is that is, Like, I don't know what
that would be. I think you've got to use I
don't know what you would what is a sarcastic emotive?
I bet there's one people use and we're just not
(32:27):
hip to. That would be my guess. Another word is old.
There was a survey for match dot com that claimed
that people who used emojis had sex more often than
those people who didn't. Apparently, the wine emoji is huge
in Britain and Australians love their drug related emojis. We're
(32:48):
gonna be in Australia, it's right, So we're gonna find
out what that's all about when we went down enda. Uh,
and of course we need to talk about the skin tone.
Very early on it was um I think in two
thousand fifteen, the Unicode Consortium changed the default skin tone
to what they call Simpson's Yellow. But then you have
(33:08):
the ability to tend them two different I think five
different skin tones to represent um, you know, at least
five different shades of skin. Right, which was a good start, right,
It was a good start. And there, I mean there's
they are still just getting going. There's plenty that have
been left off. Um like they just now are starting
to add redheads to things and curly haired people. That's crazy,
(33:31):
which is crazy, um cool that they're adding it. But yeah,
there's there's always somebody whose feelings are hurt because they're
left out by the emoji people every year. They also
say that too many smiley faces, Uh, if you're dealing
with work, And if you're dealing with work, maybe avoid
emojis would be my guess. It depends on who you're
(33:53):
talking with. I mean, if it's a friend or whatever. Yeah,
it depends on your job too. Yeah, if you're in banking,
in your community, hating with the client you've just met.
It depends on what job it is too, of course.
But there is apparently a study out there that said, um,
contrary to what you think, using too many smiley emoticons
don't increase your perception of warmth. They decrease perception of competence.
(34:18):
I totally get that. But like the study was from oh,
the Journal Social Psychological and Personality Science. It was a
two thousand seventeen study and they said, um, not only
is it a smiley face emoji not a smile, it
has some of the opposite effects, which is like, I mean,
(34:39):
it totally makes sense if you think about it, Like
somebody smiling, You're like, oh, I want to be around
that person. Somebody's saying a bunch of smiley face and
you're like, oh, what an idiot. You know, it's really
easy to cross that line. Well, yeah, and it's also
really easy to get in trouble. Um, do do not
send emoji threats because that's a real thing. There have
(35:00):
been people all over the world that have been arrested
for sending like handgun emojis two people that they were
angry at and getting arrested. Yeah, for making like actual
threats threats, right, that that counts legally, which so that raises,
um some questions about what emojis are? Are they language?
(35:21):
Are they are? There's actually I want to give um.
There's this guy I think he's a rapper actually named
Young Jake y U n G Jake. So the absence
of the oh and young indicates he might be a
rapper Young right, Young Jake? You and Carl um. But
Young Jake is an emoji portraitist. Man, that stuff was
(35:43):
so cool, didn't that awesome? Yeah? So this guy does
portraits of people, like really good portraits strictly from emojis
layered in really interesting ways. He's got like a really
great Instagram to check out too. Why you eng Jake?
But go check that one out. And then there's also
a dude named Fred Benninson and he translated um Moby
(36:07):
Dick into emojis. It's called emoji Dick. And every word
of every line of Moby Dick has been translated into emojis.
And this guy did this right. He hired three people
to translate every single line, and then he had he
hired another group of people who would look at each
(36:27):
line and then look at the line of text and say,
this is the one of the three that's the that
best gets this across for every line. So you can
get Emoji Dick online for two hundred bucks. For hard
copy two dollars, but I think he sells it by
the PDF for five bucks and as Moby Dick represented
by an egg plant in the peach, or at least
(36:50):
the egg plant. So there's a lot of like, it's
obvious that emoji is art, but there's a lot of
people out there, linguists included, who are saying emoji she
is words too, and it may be a language that's
developing in front of our eyes. It's pretty interesting as
it stands now, though technically, if you're a linguist, it
is not a language because it lacks grammar, which is
(37:11):
structures that allow you to take words and put them
into different combinations to create higher thoughts. Emojis do not
yet allow us to do that because there's not real rules. Yeah,
but there, I mean, there are people studying at this
one article you sent a woman named Rachel Tatman Uh,
a linguistics PhD candidate from the University of Washington, Go Huskies. Uh.
(37:35):
She did some studies like where she would show people
pictures like photographs and then say, how would you emoji
that description of that picture? Right right? And there are
different pictures that were subtly different, I mean, they were
obviously different, like the the first one was a man
counting money, and she would say, would you would you
(37:58):
say what this picture is doing by emoji man emoji
dollar bill or emoji dollar bill emoji man. And the results,
I mean, it seemed like she didn't get a lot
that were fifty fifty for any of these. It seems
like most of them that she got were like seventy
eight of people kind of citing one way or the
(38:19):
other as far as far as far as order goes.
So she believes kind of firmly that she's proven that
their bidirectional well, depends, It depends. So with the one
of the man counting money, of the people said that
they would they would depict that emoji wise with man
and then dollar bill. And the reason why she said
(38:41):
it was because there was an agent patient relationship. The
agent was the man acting on the money the patient,
and it was very clear. So there's really only one
way to say it. Man money, man is counting money
very much like a subject and a predicate in a sense.
That's one way they could act. They can also be um.
(39:01):
They can also kind of describe the layout of a
photo too, if there's not a very strong agent patient relationship, right,
So her takeaway basically is that they can represent like
the physical arrangement of things and also words. So there's
another one was a picture of a man walking past
the castle, and the castle's basically the big part of
(39:25):
the picture and the man's pretty small, but the man
is in the lower right corner. So most people said
that they would do castle man because the man is
not acting on the castle. Castle is not acting on
the man, but that's the yeah, and that's the way
it's arranged in the picture. So she was saying that
it can it can it can mimic the structure of sentences,
(39:47):
and it can also mimic the structure of pictures, which
makes emoji definitely their own thing. But the whole reason,
the whole point of emoji, the reason that we use them.
There's a guy named Viv Evans think he's at a
Banger University. He's a huge proponent of emojis as a
(40:08):
new way to communicate rather than a step backwards, because
you know, there's a lot of people, probably people who
hate vocal fry or like emojis so stupid. Anybody who
uses emoji stupid, And it's a giant step backwards for language,
which is what why I think the Oxford English Dictionary
was making such a statement by choosing the crying face
(40:28):
as the word of the year. They were they were
casting their lot on the side of emojis as being
a new form of communication. Um so, Viv Evans is like, yes,
that's absolutely true. And they what they do is they
stand in for things like gestures and intonation, things that
are missing in its strictly text based message like texting
(40:51):
or Twitter or an email. And that's what emojis do.
They add emotion, they convey nuance to it that otherwise
in there, and they're fun sure, like get the stick
from your peach, you can stick out of your peach
and have a lot fun with emoji's. You know what's funny?
Chuck is um the Apparently the mystery has never been
solved as too exactly why eggplant is in there in
(41:14):
the first place. It's kind of a weird one to add,
considering we didn't have redheads until recently or curly heard people,
but there's always been an eggplan. It makes you wonder, Yeah,
for sure. Uh and this is the last thing I've
got was something you sent, which is kind of a
cool move. Apple wants to be more inclusive with their emojis,
(41:35):
so they are proposing as a starting point and not
a comprehensive list there proposing including emojis uh to represent
people disabilities, so things like uh a man or a
woman with a cane, prosthetic legs and arms, guide dogs,
hearing aids, people in wheelchair stuff like that, right, and
(41:56):
those would be part of Emoji twelve point oh, which
would come out in March of two thousand nineteen. And
they just released Emoji eleven point oh to the publicum,
which includes the partying face cupcakes? Is that what this
huge list is? So these are all available now, they're
going to be available on phones in August, but they
(42:16):
were what the list was released to the public, and
this this Unicode consortium. They take all these under advisement,
but they also put him out into the public to say,
what do you guys think about these two write um
and there's a few that they will never take. They
never will will accept when of a living person, a deity,
or a business logo, all those are off the table immediately.
(42:37):
But then other ones they want to make sure aren't
too specific. And then like the Golden Arches, you'll never
see something like no, not as long as it's open source.
But there are some pretty good ones coming down the
pike this August. I wonder what super villain is. It's
um Mustache. It's kind of like a doctor Stranger, Professor
Stranger or whatever, kind of like pop call cape. Yeah,
(43:03):
it obviously gets across, especially when it's next to the
superhero one that it's the super villain. I think my
favorites coming soon are nazar Amulet. I don't even know
what that is. I don't either, Mosquito that seems relevant
there's there's one that's coming that's it's probably the best
(43:25):
emoji of all time. The clown face. Oh, that's not
a thing. It's really well done. Yeah, because that's so versatile.
It is, but it's also like a good looking emoji. Um,
is it a scary clown or now? No, it's a great, perfect,
universally beautiful clown. And I can't remember, you know, we
did our clown episodes, so I can't remember if it's
an August clown or what what type of clown it is,
(43:45):
but it's a great clown. Um. And you can see
all these by the way at emoji Pedia. I just
saw it. Oh what do you think? Did you see it? Yeah,
it's good. The guy who did Pennywise the I can't
remember which he's he's a Scars guard. That's why you
say we don't know. We'll never know, but um, he
did just an amazing job. Yeah. And I had no
(44:08):
skin in the game. I had never read any of
it or seen any previous versions at all, and I
just thought it had a lot of heart and was creepy,
and I thought it was really good. I thought it
was good too. But you could also tell that stranger
Things had come out while they were writing this, and
they were like, oh, let's retool this a little bit
to really hit the Stranger Things crowd. I don't think
(44:28):
that's true. I think it is true. I think they
were I think that script was locked long before Stranger
Things came out, and I think they retooled it. Uh,
you got anything else on the kid from Stranger Things
is in it? That was a little on the nose.
I'm curious about the timeline there. So, Um, there's another
one coming out to It's a dude with a frow
who looks exactly like Slim Good Body. That's coming out
(44:51):
in the mod Slim Good Body. Remember the guy who
wore the suit that showed his internal back in the day. Yeah,
just like Slim Good Body. And then there's a mind
blown one in a vomiting one too. But the clowns
the best one. Okay, I'm excited. Do you want him
more about emojis? Go out, go forth, start talking in emojis.
(45:15):
It's pretty interesting. Uh. And since I said it's interesting,
it's signed for listening to me. I'm gonna call this
meals on wheels. We got a lot of great follow
up from people who were in fact inspired to go
out and join Meals on Wheels, which was best case
scenario exactly what we're in Meals on Wheels was hoping for.
(45:35):
So Hey, guys, thanks for your commitment and in awesomeness.
I've been an a listener for the past few years
your might go to for workouts a long car rides.
A few weeks ago, I heard your episode of Meals
on Wheels was absolutely blown away. I'm not sure if
it was the sliding scale model for just the overall
effects of the program, but you encourage me to sign
up to serve with my local community center that offers
(45:55):
Meals on Wheels in central Ohio. He's in Columbus. Yeah.
After getting thing your printed a few days ago, I
guess you gotta do that. Sure they don't want any weirdos. No,
I am awaiting come for me like weirdos with no fingerprints.
I'm awaiting confirmation before going on my first and only
shadow ride before being a driver myself. The program is
very easy to learn, and I was surprised to hear
(46:17):
that most drivers are actually between the ages of fifty
and sixty. I signed up for once a week for
about two hours and that is considered average. Highly encourage
anyone of any age to look for the opportunity look
into this for meals on wheels, as you can do
things like food prep, administration work and more. I know
if I would have signed up. I don't know if
(46:37):
I would have signed up if not from learning about
it on your program. That's awesome. Yeah, that is from
Dalton Schaefer. Good work, Dalton, and Dalton wrote back after
I told him he was going to be a listener,
mail said, tell Josh, I live in Columbus now, and
I purposefully do not say the Ohio State University and
the natives are getting restless and angry. Be careful, Dalton,
be careful, watch yourself. Thanks for signing up for we
(47:00):
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(47:20):
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