{"id":19379,"date":"2025-07-08T09:37:31","date_gmt":"2025-07-08T07:37:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/2025\/07\/08\/face-with-tears-of-joy-a-natural-history-of-emoji-by-keith-houston-review\/"},"modified":"2025-07-08T09:37:31","modified_gmt":"2025-07-08T07:37:31","slug":"face-with-tears-of-joy-a-natural-history-of-emoji-by-keith-houston-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/2025\/07\/08\/face-with-tears-of-joy-a-natural-history-of-emoji-by-keith-houston-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Face With Tears of Joy: A natural History of Emoji by Keith Houston review"},"content":{"rendered":"

An deep dive into the surprising uses and linguistic shortfalls of the ubiquitous symbols<\/p>\n

In 2016, Apple announced that its gun emoji, previously a realistic grey-and-black revolver, would henceforth be a green water pistol. Gradually the other big tech companies followed suit, and now what is technically defined as the \u201cpistol\u201d emoji, supposed to represent a \u201chandgun or revolver\u201d, does not show either: instead you\u2019ll get a water pistol or sci-fi raygun and be happy with it. No doubt this change contributed significantly to a suppression of gun crime around the world, and it remains only to ban the bomb, knife and sword emoji to wipe out violence altogether.<\/p>\n

As Keith Houston\u2019s fascinatingly geeky and witty history shows, emoji have always been political. Over the\u00a0years, people have successfully lobbied the Unicode Consortium \u2013 the\u00a0cabal of corporations that controls the character set, including Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple \u2013 to include different skin colours and same-sex couples. It was easy to agree to add the\u00a0face with one eyebrow raised, the guide dog and the egg. But not every request is granted. One demand for a\u00a0\u201cfrowning poo emoji\u201d elicited this splendid rant from an eminent Unicode contributor, Michael Everson: \u201cWill we have a crying pile of poo next? Pile of poo with tongue sticking out? Pile of poo with question marks for eyes? Pile of poo with karaoke mic? Will we have to encode a neutral faceless pile of poo?\u201d<\/p>\n

Continue reading…<\/a>
\nAn deep dive into the surprising uses and linguistic shortfalls of the ubiquitous symbols
\nIn 2016, Apple announced that its gun emoji, previously a realistic grey-and-black revolver, would henceforth be a green water pistol. Gradually the other big tech companies followed suit, and now what is technically defined as the \u201cpistol\u201d emoji, supposed to represent a \u201chandgun or revolver\u201d, does not show either: instead you\u2019ll get a water pistol or sci-fi raygun and be happy with it. No doubt this change contributed significantly to a suppression of gun crime around the world, and it remains only to ban the bomb, knife and sword emoji to wipe out violence altogether.
\nAs Keith Houston\u2019s fascinatingly geeky and witty history shows, emoji have always been political. Over the\u00a0years, people have successfully lobbied the Unicode Consortium \u2013 the\u00a0cabal of corporations that controls the character set, including Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple \u2013 to include different skin colours and same-sex couples. It was easy to agree to add the\u00a0face with one eyebrow raised, the guide dog and the egg. But not every request is granted. One demand for a\u00a0\u201cfrowning poo emoji\u201d elicited this splendid rant from an eminent Unicode contributor, Michael Everson: \u201cWill we have a crying pile of poo next? Pile of poo with tongue sticking out? Pile of poo with question marks for eyes? Pile of poo with karaoke mic? Will we have to encode a neutral faceless pile of poo?\u201d Continue reading…Technology | The Guardian<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An deep dive into the surprising uses and linguistic shortfalls of the ubiquitous symbols In 2016, Apple announced that its gun emoji, previously a realistic grey-and-black revolver, would henceforth be a green water pistol. Gradually the other big tech companies followed suit, and now what is technically defined as the \u201cpistol\u201d emoji, supposed to represent …<\/p>\n

Face With Tears of Joy: A natural History of Emoji by Keith Houston review<\/span> Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":19380,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19379"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19379"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19379\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19380"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}