Emoji

Emoji (pronounced ih-moh-jee)

In digital technology, a small digital picture or pictorial symbol that represents a thing, feeling, concept etc, used in text messages and other electronic communications, now usually as part of a standardized set.  Technically an emoji is a digital graphic icon with a unique code point.

1999: From a creation in Japanese translating literally as “pictograph”, the construct being e- (picture, drawing) + moji (written character or letter).  In the original Japanese it’s 絵文字 (えもじ, emoji), the construct being 絵 (え (e, (picture)) + 文字 (もじ (moji) (character).

Proto emojis: Puck Magazine 1881.

Because of a cross-lingual phonetic coincidence, emoji is often thought related to the word emotion, a natural connection because it’s emotions that emojis are now used to convey.  That was the connection with the emoji’s predecessor, the emoticon, the concept of text-based symbols being used to replace certain instances of formal language.  The first codified form of the emoticon set was released in 1982 and used the standard ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) character set assembled to represent ideas as images ((*_*) being a face, : ( sadness, : (( extreme sadness etc).  The idea wasn’t new, various punctuation marks used for hundreds of years in a similar manner, including in newspapers and books, but there had never been any standardization except that which existed by agreement between regular correspondents although, in 1881, American magazine Puck published four symbols which could be used to convey joy, melancholy, indifference, and astonishment.  Assembled using standard shapes from mechanical type-setting, Puck probably either created or at least legitimized what came to be called typographical art.

The idea of localised conventions would later appeal to a community using a common means of communication with a closed character set: Morse Code operators who devised their own convenient shorthand, a set of numbers transmitted by a short series of dots and dashes, which all understood represented longer strings of text, commonly used messages including:

1- Wait a moment

4- Where shall I go ahead?

6- I am ready

7- Are you ready?

8- Close your key; circuit is busy

12- Do you understand?

13- I understand

24- Repeat this back

27- Priority, very important

29- Private, deliver in sealed envelope.

73- Best regards

88- Love and kisses

92- Deliver promptly

The concept is exactly the same as the part of the algorithm used by data compression programs (ZIP and others) whereby small values are used to represent (and replace) larger ones, hence the ability to compress file-size.  The pragmatic Morse operator's list was mostly business-like, focused on transmitting the most information with the fewest taps but there were a couple more romantic: 73 meant “best regards” and 88 “love and kisses”, both of which would become stalwarts in the world of emoticons and emojis.

Lindsay Lohan Emojis.

The idea of the emoticon, still a disparate thing without standards, began to coalesce in the 1990s, Microsoft bundling the wingdings truetype font with Windows and by the middle of the decade, the first SMS (short message services) products, the protocols for which had evolved as part of the GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) standards, were released.  Strange as it may sound in an age when SMS messages number annually in the trillions, the take-up rate was initially slow but growth was soon exponential.  Screen-focused, emoticons were always integral to SMS.

Shigetaka Kurita’s 1999 DoCoMo emoji set.

While not the first emoji set, that being a plain black collection included with the Japanese J-Phone in 1997, it’s Shigetaka Kurita’s (b 1972) release in 1999 which is the first notable landmark.  Interestingly, reflecting the intention to make communication more efficient on NTT DoCoMo's business-oriented cellular platform, apart from some hearts (intact and broken), the 176 in the set didn’t include many to convey emotion, although in the abstract, the one representing a beer glass was often used to suggest “I need a drink”.  The beginnings were modest, reflecting both the hardware and the mobile networks of the time; although bright, each was rendered in a single color and the bitmapped shape was blocky but the range and definition constantly improved to the point where, unlike emoticons, emojis really are pictures rather than typographic approximations and this has influenced the use of the word, "emoji" now sometimes applied to just about any small picture in any digital context.

A splash of vomit emojis.

In the English-speaking world, critical mass in terms of adoption was reached in 2012, the year after Apple added an official set to the iOS keyboard, Android following in 2014 when KitKat was released.  Apple had included emojis in the Japanese releases of iOS since 2008 and may have been tempted to extend availability when it became apparent how many hacks existed to gain the feature on devises using other languages.  What made that viable was emoji, in 2010, being standardized by Unicode (the non-profit consortium which maintains text standards on digital devices globally) which meant emojis could be sent and received by any device, regardless of operating system or platform.  By then, the standard set had grown to almost a thousand.  The Unicode Consortium has been busy ever since, creating an emoji subcommittee which has so much business to transact it meets at least weekly and their output has been prodigious: by September 2021, over 3,600 emojis had been approved, 112 in the last release alone.

Crooked Hillary Clinton emoji.

A character set in the thousands and growing has however changed the nature of the emoji as a language supplement, it once being possible to know them all and rely on many others also knowing most.  With so many, it’s become just another language, a system where every user has their own sub-set and analysis of traffic suggests for most this can be just a handful and even among devotees it’s rare for them regularly to display a vocabulary of more than a few dozen.  While, as a medium of meaning, the emoji does depend on an intuitive understanding of appearance, if some are too weird or mysterious, there is Emojipedia, an on-line emoji reference which documents changes and definitions and EmojiTranslate is a website where the translation of text to emoji (and vice versa) is handled.  Even that isn’t enough to satisfy the evidentiary standards of courts in some jurisdictions, accredited translators now sometimes used to translate the meaning of emojis where material using them is tendered in evidence.  Emoji is just another language and something in one cultural context can mean something else in another, the meaning the sender implied perhaps the opposite of what the receiver inferred.  On the basis of established principles such as “reasonable doubt” or “balance of probabilities”, courts must decide.

The New Yorker, 30 March 2015.

Out in the world of the emoji freaks, books have been written using nothing but emojis, a concept not new.  In the 1990s, one pop-music journalist, displeased at the quality of an interview with a singer he was about to publish, rendered the whole thing in the zaph dingbat font (which in professional typesetting had existed since the 1970s), rendering it an illegible cryptogram to all except those who had memorized the mapping of the font.  Such people do exist but they’re rare and it’s not clear if the writer succeeded in his aim to make more interesting a boring interview.  One magazine to find a novel use was the fine New Yorker which, in 2015, ran a cover featuring Crooked Hillary Clinton emojis when discussing the mail server affair, one of the many scandals attached to her although, they unfortunately resisted the temptation to integrate a delete key into one.  Perhaps inspired, in her presidential campaign, crooked Hillary tried to weaponize the emoji in a tweet aimed at a younger demographic but received quite a backlash for doing something so obviously cynical; inauthentic being the modern term.

The work of the consortium has also been cognizant of forces operating more widely.  In 2014, they began to address the lack of racial and gender DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) in the little images, the population disproportionately male and white, a distortion of reality hardly appropriate in what was to some degree one of the world’s global languages.  In this they were later than some; in 2012, the ever-woke Apple included in iOS 6 several emojis of same-sex couples.  Although all were shown holding hands, they didn’t look any happier than their more traditional predecessors but there are limitations with what can be achieved on such a tiny digital canvas.  In another sign of the times, over the years, guns morphed into less threatening water-pistols.  Perhaps strangely, the pandemic didn’t produce a flood of corona-themed images, Apple’s set still the only of the majors to include something recognizably SARS-Cov-2ish.  Still, there's plenty of time, world emoji day is 17 July and COVID-19, unlike some of us, is expected to be alive and well for many Julys to come.

React

React (pronounced ree-akt)

(1) To act in response to an agent or influence.

(2) To act reciprocally upon each other, as two things.

(3) To act in opposition, as against some force.

(4) To respond to a stimulus in a particular manner.

(5) In physics, to exert an equal force in the opposite direction to an acting force; to act in a reverse direction or manner, especially so as to return to a prior condition.

(6) In chemistry, to act upon each other; to exercise a reciprocal or a reverse effect, as two or more chemical agents; to act in opposition.

(7) In chemistry, to cause or undergo a chemical reaction.

(8) In the hyphenated form re-act, to act or again perform.

(9) To return an impulse or impression; in Internet use, to post a reaction (now often in the form of an emoji), indicating how one feels about a posted message.

1635–1645: From the early Modern English react (to exert, as a thing acted upon, an opposite action upon the agent).  The construct was re- + act, thought to have been modeled on the Medieval Latin reagere, the construct being re- + agere (to drive, to do).  Act was from the Middle English acte, from the Old French acte, from the Latin ācta (register of events), the plural of āctum (decree, law), from agere (to do, to act), ultimately from the primitive Indo-European héǵeti and related to the German Akte (file); it partially displaced deed, from the Old English dǣd (act, deed) which endured and (especially in law), flourished in parallel.  The re- prefix was from the Middle English re-, from the circa 1200 Old French re-, from the Latin re- & red- (back; anew; again; against), from the primitive Indo-European wre & wret- (again), a metathetic alteration of wert- (to turn).  It displaced the native English ed- & eft-.  A hyphen is not normally included in words formed using this prefix, except when the absence of a hyphen would (1) make the meaning unclear, (2) when the word with which the prefix is combined begins with a capital letter, (3) when the word with which the is combined with begins with another “re”, (4) when the word with which the prefix is combined with begins with “e”, (5) when the word formed is identical in form to another word in which re- does not have any of the senses listed above.  As late as the early twentieth century, the dieresis was sometimes used instead of a hyphen (eg reemerge) but this is now rare except when demanded for historic authenticity or if there’s an attempt deliberately to affect the archaic.  Re- may (and has) been applied to almost any verb and previously irregular constructions appear regularly in informal use; the exception is all forms of “be” and the modal verbs (can, should etc).  Although it seems certain the origin of the Latin re- is the primitive Indo-European wre & wret- (which has a parallel in Umbrian re-), beyond that it’s uncertain and while it seems always to have conveyed the general sense of "back" or "backwards", there were instances where the precise was unclear and the prolific productivity in Classical Latin tended make things obscure.  The Latin prefix rĕ- was from the Proto-Italic wre (again) and had a parallel in the Umbrian re- but the etymology was always murky.   In use, there was usually at least the hint of the sense "back" or "backwards" but so widely was in used in Classical Latin and beyond that the exact meaning is sometimes not clear.  Etymologists suggest the origin lies either in (1) a metathesis (the transposition of sounds or letters in a word) of the primitive Indo-European wert- (to turn) or (2) the primitive Indo-European ure- (back), which was related to the Proto-Slavic rakъ (in the sense of “looking backwards”).

The hyphenated form re-act (to act or again perform) began to develop during the 1650s (although the hyphen wasn’t de rigueur for decades) and there’s evidence to suggest there was often either an exaggerated pronunciation of the “re-“ or a slight pause between syllables to distinguish it from react.  Forms like overreact & overreaction (1928), interreact, interreaction (1820s), reactivate (1902 & reactivation et al were coined as required.  React is a noun & verb, reactive is an adjective, reactor, reaction & reactant are nouns, reactionary is a noun & adjective, reactivate, reacted & reacting are verbs,; the noun plural is reacts.

Lindsay Lohan reacting, demonstrating her emotional range (left to right:  happy, surprised, terrified and despairing).

The noun reactant (a reacting thing) came from chemistry and dates from 1901; as an adjective it was noted in the literature by 1911 although it may have been in oral use for some time and the noun reactance had been in the vocabulary of science since at least 1893.  The noun reactor (one that reacts) was a standard entry in the books of Latin instruction by 1825 but came into common use in the electrical industry after 1915 to describe “coil or other piece of equipment which provides reactance in a circuit”.  The word is now most commonly associated with nuclear energy, the reactor technically the component in a power-plant, submarine etc, where the nuclear reactions are contained but in the popular imagination often used of the power-generating installations to describe the entire facility.  The adjective reactive dates from 1712 in the sense of “a repercussive, echoing” although that use is long obsolete.  It was re-purposed in the early nineteenth century to mean “caused by a reaction” and by 1888 as “susceptible to (chemical) reaction” and in chemistry the related forms were reactively, reactiveness & reactivity, the words required as new chemicals and elements were subjected to experiments determining the behavior when exposed to others.

The noun reaction (action in resistance or response to another action or power), although later much used in chemistry, dates from the language of physics & dynamics in the 1640s and came frequently to be seen in discussions of politics and international relations.  It was modeled on the French réaction, from the older Italian reattione, from the Medieval Latin reactionem (nominative reactio), a noun of action formed in Late Latin from the past-participle stem of Latin reagere.  In chemistry it was of course invaluable when describing “a mutual or reciprocal action of chemical agents upon each other” and it was the standard noun thus used by 1836.  The more general sense of "action or feeling in response" (to something said, an event etc) was from the early twentieth century.  The phrase reaction time (time elapsing between the action of an external stimulus and the giving of a signal in reply) was a creation of experimental science and first documented in 1874; it was later widely used (both as a precise measure and something indicative) in fields as varied as zoology, sport and electoral behavior.  Sometimes, the experiments to measure reaction times were conducted in a reaction chamber.

Porträt des Klemens Wenzel Nepomuk Lothar, Prince of Metternich-Winneburg zu Beilstein in Ritterorden des Godenen vlies (cerimonial robes of the Order of the Golden Fleece) (1836), oil on canvas by Johann Nepomuk Ender (1793-1854).

The adjective reactionary (of or pertaining to political reaction, tending to revert from a more to a less advanced policy) dates from 1831 and was on the model of the French réactionnaire.  It was part of Karl Marx's (1818-1883) standard set of descriptive terms by 1858, used to convey the idea of “tending toward reversing existing tendencies” and was the opposite of the ”revolutionary”.  The classic reactionary era is now that created by the Congress of Vienna (1514-1815) when the old monarchies contrived to ensure they wouldn’t again be threatened by something like the French Revolution (1789).  So dominant did the use in politics become that the use in science (of or pertaining to a chemical or other reaction) became rare.  In political science, the term reactionary is applied with rather more precision than in general use where, like fascist, it’s tended to become a general term of disapprobation for those who espouse an opposing view.  When applied with some academic rigor, it refers properly to the view that a previous political state of society is desirable and that action should be taken to return to those arrangements.  A reactionary is thus different from a conservative who wishes to keep things as they are but perhaps (at least sometimes) synonymous with ultra-conservative or arch-conservative, the classic example in politics being Prince Klemens von Metternich (1773–1859; foreign minister or chancellor of the Austrian Empire 1809-1848) who constructed an intricate model of Europe which was design to avoid another unpleasantness (for the ruling class) like the French revolution (1789) and its aftermath.  It’s usually thought of as somewhere on the spectrum of conservatism although there are logical (as well as linguistic) problems with that and either in theory or historic practice, reactionary ideologies, although radical, haven’t always been the most extreme of the breed.  Even that sort of terminology wasn’t reliably indicative of anything except what the author intended, Sir Garfield Barwick (1903–1997; Chief Justice of Australia 1964-1981) giving his autobiography the title A Radical Tory (1995), a few reviewers enjoying the opportunity to point out he was neither.

Thou shalt not: Pope Pius IX and friends.

In the UK there were of course already the Tories but it was the French Revolution from which English gained the descriptors "conservative", "right-wing" and "reactionary".  Conservative was from the French conservateur and was applied to those deputies of the French assembly which supported the monarchy (ie they wish to conserve that which was).  The term right-wing came to be used because when the Estates General was summoned in 1789, liberal deputies (the Third Estate) sat usually to left of the presiding officer's chair while the (variously usually either conservative or reactionary) members of the aristocracy (the Second Estate) sat to the right (the clerics were the First Estate and it’s from here is derived the later idea of the press as the Fourth Estate).  Reactionary was from the late eighteenth century French réactionnaire (from réaction (reaction)) and was used to denote "a ideology directed to return the structure of the state and the operation of society to a previous condition of affairs".  The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) dates the first use of the word in English to 1799 and political scientists have managed to coin variations like reactionist and even the (thankfully rare) reactionaryism.  In theology, the classic reactionary was Pope Pius IX (Giovanni Maria Mastai Ferretti, 1792–1878; pope 1846-1878) who in 1864 published Syllabus Errorum (Syllabus of Errors), a still controversial document which listed all the ideas of modernity which His Holiness thought most appalling and which should be abandoned because the old ways are the best.  Had he lived, his Holiness would have noted with approval the entry in that manual curmudgeons, Henry Fowler's (1858–1933) A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926): "The word derives its pejorative sense from the conviction, once firmly held but now badly shaken, that all progress is necessarily good."