I made an emoji-sky generator on Glitch with Andrea Gaither and Jez Smith. Andrea is an amazing engineer and made the code actually work and display Twemoji (I think the flatness of Twemoji designs works really well for emoji grid art). Jez swooped in later to tidy everything up (he really cares about code being as efficient and elegant as possible). It's based on the glorious Emoji Garden by Monica Dinculescu.
Read More🐛I wrote a bug emoji review, because this emoji is mostly adorable.🐛
I was surprised when I first learned that this emoji was called the bug emoji, because most platforms display this particular emoji as a caterpillar. When someone says "bug," I don't imagine a caterpillar. To me, the prototypical bug has more of a dark bulbous body.
Read MoreIt's Word of the Year (WOTY) season.
The last group that weighs in on WOTY is the American Dialect Society (ADS), which has been selecting WOTYs since 1990. This vote is made by a room full of linguists, so the words chosen often have an element of linguistic interest to them. Past words have included Because X, #BlackLivesMatter, and gender-neutral singular they.
Read MoreThere's a lot to unpack when discussing the gun emoji. In Part 1 of this series, I looked at the raw counts of hits for various emoji that come before and after the gun emoji. Though that's fascinating in its own right, I knew that ultimately I wanted to filter out the most common emoji and calculate the pairings using normalized relative frequencies to further chip away at the question of what comes before and after the gun emoji.
I also touched on three reasons why the gun emoji is so interesting to study: it's directional, it looks different across platforms, and its meaning is culturally "loaded." In this post I want to focus on the last of these reasons because it's such a complex issue.
Read MoreWhen I learned about emoji reviews, I got very excited. Not only are these a delight to read (I really like the snake emoji review), but they also present a great visual example of how the variance in emoji display across different platforms can lead to miscommunication.
If you're a person who is sometimes asked by journalists "Will emoji replace English!?" (I am), this is one more example you can point to of how difficult it is to have some sort of universal understanding, even within one Unicode codepoint.
In case I wasn't clear: 🚨Emoji will not replace English🚨
But they are a lot of fun. Here's my first-ever emoji review.
Read MoreThe gun emoji is of particular interest to me because it's directional. By this I mean that whether an emoji comes before or after the gun emoji impacts the meaning. To put it simply, order very much matters when we're talking about who is being shot and who is pulling the trigger.
Read MoreOver the last couple of years, I've been hearing the term self-care a lot, and it's clear to me that its usage falls on a spectrum. On one end, it's used earnestly in the context of self-preservation and healing from trauma, and on the other end it's used as a marketing label slapped on bath bombs, face masks, and body lotions.
Curious about its roots, I did some research.
Read MoreEvery year several dictionaries name a Word of the Year (WOTY). Cynics might say this is a publicity stunt, but I think it's a fascinating intellectual exercise and I love that at the end of the year, lexicographers have an excuse to deeply reflect on words that were significant over the past 12 months. Even more than that, I love that various WOTYs give people who don't usually spend their days obsessing over words the opportunity to engage with language in a meaningful way.
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