Happy Thought for 5 May 2023

Have a Happy Thought: 

 

One of the very first Happy Thought emails I ever sent gave us all a different perspective on the warning lights in our cars.

 

And when you think about it, warning lights and all sorts of other symbols are really just like emojis – it’s all about packaging a lot of information into a little symbol, right?

Side note – the word emoji comes to English from Japanese: and literally means picture-character or picture-letter: (picture, 絵, pronounced eh)+(letter/character, 文字, mōji).

 

Well, how many times have you hunted through the entire emoji list, trying to find the one that matched the exact thing you were trying to convey?

(If you’re like me, about twice, and even then you probably gave up partway through – there are so. many. emojis!)

 

Others have felt this pain, and have proposed other emojis. Since not every emoji can (or should!) exist… there is a graveyard of emojis that.. just haven’t made the cut. (yet? Some of these may appear in future Unicode updates, looks like the next one is scheduled for 18 October 2023)

 

May I introduce a few of these to you:

Face with Pained Eyes and Teeth Clenched 

Yellow circular face with stylised E and backwards E for eyes and a grimacing mouth, teeth showing

Frowning Face with Question Marks as Eyes 

Yellow circular face with question marks (the dots becoming the eyes) and a downward boomerang shape for a mouth.

 Face Banging Against Wall

black and white sketch of a face, side-on, touching a flat surface

 

Expressionless Face Half Covered by Hair – they really missed a trick by not calling this one the emo-ji. 

Yellow circular face with a eye partially closed and a straight-line mouth. the other eye and half the face is covered by long black hair.

 

I won’t post these one-by-one, but obviously someone wants to be able to write emoji recipes.

a table showing sketch images in left column and single-words in the right column. all of them are foods, including yogurt, soybean, buckwheat, sesame, celery...

 

Again not posting each one but someone else really wanted to discuss all of their favourite dinosaurs.

a table showing sketch images in left column and single-words in the right column. all of them are dinosaurs, including triceratops, pachycephalosaurus, archaeopteryx, and pterosaur.

 Final, serious-but-uplifting side note: reading through the Unicode committee’s notes as they go through all of these shows evidence of a group of people who are working together in a really wonderful way. They take their role seriously, but the existence of some of the emojis shows they don’t take themselves – or human communication – too seriously. These are people that are largely invisible to most of us but we benefit from their work every day (not just emojis – any and all symbols we use in writing that we send electronically, including letters, are based on Unicode). Thank you, Unicode Consortium!!

 

 

You can see the whole list of rejected emojis here: https://charlottebuff.com/unicode/misc/rejected-emoji-proposals/

There’s actually some good ones in there, and I hope to see them in future releases!