Another marker of the mainstream-ization of emoji: Dictionary.com is now offering entries that explain their meaning. As Time reports:
As Dictionary.com can now make clear with authority, having researched this emoji with the same tactics lexicographers use when defining a new word, the eggplant emoji is a symbolic penis. The goat emoji is used as a stand-in for the acronym GOAT, meaning Greatest of All Time. And the upside-down face emoji may convey “silliness, sarcasm, passive aggression, or frustrated resignation.”
Dictionary.com is not trying to insist that emoji are words, though they can function like old-fashioned letter-blobs. The company has not even defined them, per se. Lexicographer Jane Solomon compares what they’re providing to usage notes, paragraphs found alongside definitions that give additional context about how and when a word is used. The explanations for the first batch of about 20 emoji are more conversational and informal than your traditional ˈdik-shə-ner-ē fare. They tellingly live on the editorial part of Dictionary.com’s website.
Me, I'm in favor of this sort of codification. Emoji are a genuinely cool evolution of our daily communications; among other things, they have -- as linguists told me when I researched this a while ago for Wired -- consistent linguistic rules for use. (We most often put face emoji before other emoji, because face emoji convey our "stance" -- the emotional tone of the sentence we're constructing out of images.) I'll be interested to see how emoji start cropping up in Strunk-and-White-style writing guides in the years to come.
Clemson’s national championship football team went to the White House on Monday where President Donald Trump hosted them for winning the title. Trump had a bunch of burgers ready for them: Wendy’s, McDonald’s and Burger King.
There are three Egyptian hieroglyphs depicting penises, each with Unicode characters: 𓂸𓂹 𓂺 Amazingly, no-one seems to know about them despite their being among the most succinct and obviously useful glyphs in the standard. The RealRevK reports: They are rather innocuously named U+130B8: EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH D052, U+130B9: EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH D052A, and U+130BA: EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH D053. […]
: (◕(‘ 人 ‘) ◕) : Oh, the huge manatees! Need a mental health break? Step on in to our transparent canoe. 🛶
Use a single password for every website, and you’re compromising your security. Use a different one each time, and you’re bound to lose track of them. The solution? RoboForm Everywhere, a catch-all tool that will not only manage the passwords on every site you visit but generate better ones. As a simple password database, it’s […]
Just a reminder: Print isn’t dead. And now that printers are becoming as portable as cell phones, it might be around for quite some time. Enter the MEMOBIRD Mobile Thermal Printer, a mini-printer that is versatile, portable – and most importantly, never needs a refill on ink or toner. Measuring just a few inches around, […]
What do Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google all have in common? Somewhere in their framework, they all use MySQL, that most versatile (and free!) of database management systems. And they’re not alone. If your company or the one you’d like to work for wrangles data (and who doesn’t?), they’re going to need someone with a […]
