A Second Opinion: Oh, those emojis!

Emojis can range from the oh-so-cute to the blatantly ugly and vicious. Considered
too juvenile for  serious communications, they are too “cartoonish” for
skilled writers and communicators to be tempted to use.

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By Mary Foran

A little pasado de moda (out of style) in the United States, and not always considered “politically correct”, emojis can range from the oh-so-cute to the blatantly ugly and vicious.

Ubiquitous and popular as they have been, they are considered too juvenile for serious communications and are too “cartoonish” for skilled writers and communicators to be tempted to use.

They became famous, however, as a quick way to text and email your emotions and answers to queries. Emojis have been available since the mid-2000s through separate apps, which let users copy and paste the icons into text messages and emails. In 2011 Apple added official emoji keyboards to IOS. Android followed suit two years later. As emoji became more popular they also became more plentiful.

You could describe emoji as “ideagrams”. Before emojis there were emoticons which were facial expressions made with punctuation marks.

Emoji were created by the Japanese engineer Shigetaka Kurita in 1998 when he was working for the Japanese telephone company NTT Docomo. He was working on a way for customers to communicate through icons. The result was a set of 176 icons he called emoji.  The name emoji combines two Japanese characters: the “e” (picture) and “moji” (character).

Now on the internet you can find many different emoji-style icons which have nothing to do with the originals.

Being a fast and precise typist on texts and emails is still the best way to communicate so that misunderstandings don’t occur .”Thumbs up” or “Thumbs down” or “like” and “dislike” sometimes doesn’t say it all.

What if you are just somewhere in the middle?

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Feaured image/Kaz Vorpal , CC BY2.0