![\"FaceWithTearsOfJoy\"](\"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/FaceWithTearsOfJoy.jpg\")
<\/a>.<\/p>\nYep. That\u2019s right. It\u2019s an emoji, and its official name is \u201cFace with Tears of Joy\u201d. It was chosen, because \u2013 and I quote \u2013 \u201c[it] best reflected the ethos, mood, and preoccupations of 2015.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s going to be interesting to juxtapose that with whatever turns out to be voted the most read\/significant news event of 2015.<\/p>\n That aside, I\u2019m currently struggling with the fact that it was the organization behind one of the most respected dictionaries in the world that selected a symbol as its word of the year. I fully accept that the use of symbols as well as abbreviations is here to stay, and I also acknowledge that they are very useful informal communication tools. However, if words of the year and their shortlist siblings are contenders for inclusion in a future dictionary, where will\u00a0 There\u2019s an online quiz<\/a> that you can take to see how well you know your emoji, and in the name of research I took it.<\/p>\n The bad news is that I scored 21%.\u00a0 The good news is that I was one of 9098 people who scored less than 50%. Emoji (the plural is either emoji or emojis) are just one of many short forms of communication that we use today, but the use of symbols to communicate predates written communication by a very long time. Once scriptorial documentation had evolved sufficiently, writers adopted all kinds of abbreviations for commonly-used words, and several forms of shorthand were developed from the sixteenth century on. The famous English Diarist Samuel Pepys wrote in shorthand (which was very prudent, given the number of sexual indiscretions he chronicled; had Elisabeth, his wife, read any of those entries, his career as a diarist and naval administrator may have come to a sudden mariticidal halt!)<\/p>\n However, the transition from pictograph (such as Egyptian hieroglyphs) to script is universally considered a great leap forward in communications, so we\u2019ll take a great leap forward in time, to the 19th century.<\/p>\n The 19th century saw the introduction of technology to communication. Morse code was developed as a means of communicating messages via pulses of electricity. It seems to have been recognized relatively quickly that communication speed could be increased if full words were not transmitted, so a set of abbreviations evolved. Examples include \u201cWUD\u201d for \u201cwould\u201d and \u201cPLS\u201d for \u201cplease\u201d. Initialisms were also used \u2013 for example, \u201cGM\u201d and \u201cGA\u201d for \u201cgood morning\u201d and \u201cgood afternoon\u201d respectively.<\/p>\n Not a million miles from LOL, BTW and IMO\u2026<\/p>\n Perhaps the most famous Morse code signal though is \u201cSOS\u201d. And in researching for this article, I learned some interesting stuff. If only I had space to include it here!<\/p>\n Most people know that \u2022 \u2022 \u2022 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2022 \u2022 \u2022 is the internationally-recognized distress call. When it was proposed and adopted (in 1908), it was proposed in the form of dots and dashes, not as letters. Its attraction was that it was nine pulses long, was broken into three groups of three, and since dots outnumbered dashes, was more likely to be able to be transmitted on a fading power source. The pattern is transmitted as a continuous sequence rather than with a pause between letters, making it a Morse prosign<\/em>. Prosigns are represented in written form using the letters that the dot-dash pattern equates to. \u2022 \u2022 \u2022 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2022 \u2022 \u2022\u00a0 equates to \u201cSOS\u201d, but also to \u201cVTB\u201d, \u201cIJS\u201d, \u201cVGI\u201d and \u201cSMB\u201d. (Prosign letters also have a line above them. Please forgive my omission of those lines!)<\/p>\n \u201cSOS\u201d quickly became the standard prosign for \u2022 \u2022 \u2022 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2022 \u2022 \u2022 . Apparently, a 1918 telegraphy book stated that there was no special significance in the letters themselves. The various interpretations of SOS (e.g., \u201cSave Our Souls\u201d, \u201cSave Our Ship\u201d, and \u201cStop Other Signals\u201d) are backronyms<\/a> that make it easy to remember the letters, which in turn make it easy to remember the Morse code for the prosign.<\/p>\n The Smiley (or as it seems to be better known, \u201cHappy Face\u201d) existed in a number of forms starting as far back as 1900. According to a BBC radio programme broadcast in 2012, the Smiley as we know it was created in 1963 by an American named Harvey Ball, who was paid $45.00 for it. Neither he nor the people who paid him bothered to copyright it, so others have made a pile of money from variants\/replicas of the design. I haven\u2019t been able to get to the bottom of the ownership debate, but it seems that a company with the rather predictable name of \u201cSmiley Co.\u201d has the design registered in more than eighty countries.<\/p>\n According to Oxford Dictionaries, the word originated in the 1990s, but as a phenomenon, emoticons seem to have been around since the second half of the 19th century. For example, a U.S. satirical magazine, \u201cPuck\u201d, published a set of emoticons that they referred to as \u201cTypographical Art<\/a>\u201d in 1881.<\/p>\n The first documented use<\/a> of the emoticons \ud83d\ude42<\/strong> and \ud83d\ude41<\/strong> occurred in 1982 – way before the internet and cellphones with texting capabilities became available to the masses. Finally we had a way to express the joy, sadness and humorous intent implicit in our emails!<\/p>\n The transition from text to icons\/pictograms had to wait until it was common to use a computer that was capable of handling more than text.<\/p>\n And then it had to wait until someone realized that they could substitute \ud83d\ude42<\/strong> with Going from\u00a0 And given the popularity of the image, the ensuing ownership claims and law suits are hardly surprising.<\/p>\n And so to the present day, and Oxford Dictionaries\u2019 2015 Word of the Year.<\/p>\n Emoji are a Japanese contribution to communication. They are ideograms \u2013 graphic symbols that represent ideas or concepts. Because they\u2019re Japanese, some of the symbols are a little odd to western eyes \u2013 for example, \u201cface with medical mask\u201d ? \u201cface with look of triumph\u201d\u00a0 Emoji have been enthusiastically embraced \u2013 they\u2019ve appeared in several releases of the Unicode standard, a computing industry standard for the consistent processing of text expressed in most of the world\u2019s writing systems. No smartphone is complete without them. Webmail facilities such as Gmail offer them, as do email programs such as Mozilla\u2019s Thunderbird. Heck \u2013 I\u2019m sure that modern microwave ovens display an appropriate emoji (\u201cperson salivating impatiently\u201d) when the food\u2019s cooked!<\/p>\n It\u2019s highly unlikely that emoji and other, future pictograms will complete an evolutionary circle by replacing text-based communication. The Egyptian hieroglyphs and their antecedents and successors were all limited in their ability to express information.<\/p>\n Imagine a world in which all non-verbal communication is conducted using techniques used by self-assembly furniture companies such as IKEA. Material tolerances for airplanes and ships being specified by pictographs – now there\u2019s a challenge for a Technical Communicator. Groucho Marx\u2019s quote – \u201cA child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.\u201d \u2013 might provide inspiration for who might attempt to compose such a set of instructions!<\/p>\n What’s your take on the Oxford Dictionaries’ choice for 2015? Do you use emoji or emoticons? How would you react to them being in your performance review or “workforce adjustment notification”? Let me know by leaving a comment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Are you one of the old school that laments the use of abbreviations and picture symbols in communications? The folk over at Oxford Dictionaries clearly aren\u2019t. Their 2015 Word of the Year is\u2026 . Yep. That\u2019s right. It\u2019s an emoji, and its official name is \u201cFace with Tears of Joy\u201d. It was chosen, because \u2013 and I quote \u2013 \u201c[it]… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":119,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[490],"tags":[493],"class_list":["post-117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-commentaries","tag-wrong-words"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=117"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1575,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117\/revisions\/1575"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/119"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>\u00a0 be filed? How will other emoji be sequenced?<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nWhat Goes Around…<\/h3>\n
— — .-. … .\u00a0 -.-. — -.. . (Morse Code)<\/h3>\n
Smileys<\/h3>\n
Emoticons<\/h3>\n
<\/a> if the typeface (font) included it.<\/p>\n<\/a> to <\/a>\u00a0 required the ability to embed graphics in text, but we\u2019ve had that ability for many, many years now, even in email programs on computers and on cell phones.<\/p>\n…Comes Around<\/h3>\n
<\/a>\u00a0 and \u201cperson bowing deeply\u201d. ? I included \u201cface with medical mask\u201d after some friends commented to me that they saw a number of East Asian folk out in the back country of the Canadian Rockies watching a lunar eclipse wearing medical masks. It seemed strange to my friends; and it seems strange to me, given the purity of the air up there.<\/p>\nYour Turn<\/h2>\n