The other day while chatting on Discord, I paused to pick out an emoji to apply to a friend’s comment. I wanted to use a heart to show that I liked the comment, but I’d already used the red heart and wanted to add a little more flair. Usually I just pick a pink one arbitrarily, but in that moment, I was like, WTF do all these little hearts actually mean? Do they have official meanings? Am I using them wrong?
It’sacommonquestion, and the answer seems to essentially be: “No, there are no official meanings,” although according to Emojipedia the hearts do at least have official names: growing heart, beating heart, and revolving hearts (to choose the three that were least obvious to me).
The revolving hearts were the most confusing, in my opinion. Why are they revolving? According to The Pioneer Woman, they mean “falling in love, or deep affection.” That didn’t seem right, so I asked a few friends.
“Sending love?” my husband said. “I don’t know.”
“Love,” a friend said. “But specifically between you and the person you’re sending it to. It’s like a step up from ❤️.”
Another friend said something similar: “Like ❤️,” she wrote, “but 10% more girlie and romantic.”
I asked Jason. “I would say there’s a strong feeling of being intertwined,” he said. “Like, I wouldn’t send that to a friend. I don’t think I have ever received that particular emoji from anyone.”
“Ok, I’ve never used that particular one,” another friend echoed, “but I always use the two hearts 💕 instead of a red heart, because I think it’s cuter. I have no idea what 💞 means.”
Emojipedia leaves it open-ended in its 💞 emoji-descriptor: “Hearts revolving around one or more other hearts.” (Around even more hearts?) In a 2020 post, Emojipedia also acknowledged that “intrinsically each heart has no more coded meaning than what meets the eye.”
Ok, if you haven’t seen this before (or even if you have), I need to warn you that Emoji Kitchen is just a little bit addictive. They’re mashup apps for making new emoji like these:
Curiously, the eggplant seems to be missing from both kitchens… 🤔
Sadly, the site you link to about emoji kitchen (.dev) is not mine. This developer has taken my artwork without permission 😐 and worse, hosts a repo so others can steal it too
Google has developed a typeface called Noto that seemingly includes every single character and symbol used for writing in the history of the world. I mean, look at all these different options: Korean, Bengali, Emoji, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Coptic, Old Hungarian, Cuneiform, Linear B, Osage, and literally dozens more.
Noto is a collection of high-quality fonts with multiple weights and widths in sans, serif, mono, and other styles. The Noto fonts are perfect for harmonious, aesthetic, and typographically correct global communication, in more than 1,000 languages and over 150 writing systems.
A particular shoutout to Noto Emoji: it supports the latest emoji release (14.0) and includes 3,663 emoji in multiple weights.
Perhaps it’s time for a new typeface ‘round these parts…
Update: I got it in my head that Noto was a new typeface, but it was first released in 2013. But Noto’s monochrome emoji font is new — I think that’s where I got confused.
While it predates the COVID-19 pandemic and its accompanying social distancing by several years, José Manuel Ballester’s Concealed Spaces project reimagines iconic works of art without the people in them (like what’s happening to our public spaces right now). No one showed up for Leonardo’s Last Supper:
Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights is perhaps just as delightful without people:
And Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus has been rescheduled:
You’ve likely heard of hygge, the Danish word for a special feeling of coziness that’s been productized on Instagram and elsewhere to within an inch of its charming life. The Finns have a slightly different take on the good life called kalsarikännit, which roughly translates to “pantsdrunk” in English. A promotional site from the Finnish government defines it as “the feeling when you are going to get drunk home alone in your underwear — with no intention of going out”. They made the emoji above to illustrate pantsdrunkenness.1
When it comes to happiness rankings, Finland always scores near the top. Many Finnish phenomena set the bar high: the best education system, gender equality, a flourishing welfare state, sisu or bull-headed pluck. Behind all of these accomplishments lies a Finnish ability to stay calm, healthy and content in a riptide of endless tasks and temptations. The ability comes from the practice of “kalsarikanni” translated as pantsdrunk.
Peel off your clothes down to your underwear. Place savory or sweet snacks within reach alongside your bed or sofa. Make sure your television remote control is nearby along with any and all devices to access social media. Open your preferred alcohol. Your journey toward inner strength, higher quality of life, and peace of mind has begun.
Kalsarikännit isn’t as photogenic as hygge but there is some evidence of it on Instagram. As Rantanen explains, this lack of performance is part of the point:
“Pantsdrunk” doesn’t demand that you deny yourself the little things that make you happy or that you spend a fortune on Instagrammable Scandi furniture and load your house with more altar candles than a Catholic church. Affordability is its hallmark, offering a realistic remedy to everyday stress. Which is why this lifestyle choice is the antithesis of posing and pretence: one does not post atmospheric images on Instagram whilst pantsdrunk. Pantsdrunk is real. It’s about letting go and being yourself, no affectation and no performance.
I have been off alcohol lately, but kalsarikännit is usually one of my favorite forms of relaxation, particularly after a hard week.
That’s right, the Finnish government made emoji of people getting pantsdrunk. Americans are suuuuuper uptight.↩
Post-Brexit, people in the UK started wearing safety pins to show their stance against racism and their solidarity with immigrants.
In response to the open environment of hatred, people across the U.K. are now wearing safety pins — and tweeting pictures of themselves wearing them — in an act of solidarity with immigrants.
We need a symbol like that in the United States now. These are vicious days in America. The deplorables are emboldened. The Washington Post reports that there have already been two attacks on Muslim women on college campuses. At San Diego State University, two men ranting about Trump and Muslims robbed a student wearing hijab.
I like this idea, that a subtle marker can denote a social safe space of sorts, a signal to someone who might feel uncomfortable that an ally is nearby. That’s not to say you can put a pin on your coat and *dust off your hands, job well done* but it may help. I’m going to try it.
The people of Norway also had to deal with German soldiers day in and day out for five years. By 1945, some 400,000 German troops were operating in Norway, controlling the population of about 4 million people.
It was in the autumn of 1940 when students at Oslo University started wearing paperclips on their lapels as a non-violent symbol of resistance, unity, and national pride.
Symbols related to the royal family and state had already been banned, and they wanted a clever way of displaying their rejection of the Nazi ideology. In addition to wearing a single paperclip, paperclip bracelets and other types of jewellery were fashioned as well, symbolically binding Norwegians together in the face of such adversity.
Of course, once the Nazis got wind of this, wearing paperclips became a crime. (via @ckrub)
wear safety pin to fool people into thinking you’re a safe space, trigger them
If I had to guess however, this behavior will be short lived and they’ll move on to some other genius scheme. I’m not taking my pin off. (via @_McFIy & @pattersar)
Update: There’s no safety pin emoji, but some people are adding the paperclip emoji to their Twitter usernames as a virtual world counterpart to the safety pin.
A screenshot of how Taylor Hodge data labels his sleep.
The other day I posted about the trend away from five-star reviews to emoji reviews, and on Twitter reader Taylor Hodge shared his unique method of using emoji to data label his sleeping patterns: “Recently I’ve been using emoji as data labels in @sleepcycle,” he tweeted. Interested in learning more, I interviewed Taylor via email about how he tracks his personal data with emoji.
How old are you, what do you do for a living, and where do you live?
My name is Taylor Hodge, I’m 25 years old, and currently I live in Myrtle Beach, SC (although my plan is to change that in 2016). I’ve spent the past ~5 years working in restaurants and serving tables to support myself, but I harbor a deep, wholehearted fascination with data science and machine learning that I am in the process of pursuing.
What’s Sleep Cycle and why do you use it?
Sleep Cycle is an alarm clock for iOS and Android that tracks your sleep cycles during rest by monitoring your movement and behavior during sleep via sound analysis. This information is then used to optimize your waking time, ensuring that you wake up in your desired time window between the light and REM sleep cycles.
I use Sleep Cycle because it wakes me up more effectively than any other alarm I’ve ever used. (Admittedly, I’ve never tried any “sunrise” alarms like this one, but I’m very interested in doing so.) In my experience, its combination of sleep tracking and alarm windows (with steadily increasing alarm volumes) leaves me energized and rejuvenated after being gently woken, as opposed to being groggy and sleep drunk when being woken up by harsh, shrill, traditional alarm clocks. Sleep Cycle also allows you to use “sleep notes” to label activities and learn how they effect the quality of your sleep. This feedback is incredibly useful and has allowed for actionable changes in my behavior that have drastically improved the quality of my sleep.
Where did you come up with the idea of using emoji for data labeling?
The idea for using emoji for data labeling arose out of my own laziness. After training myself and practicing to become a morning person over the past ~6 months, I wanted a clean slate with Sleep Cycle, so I erased all of my past data, not realizing that all of my previous data labels would be erased as well. When I realized this was the case, I decided that I didn’t want to take the time to type the meticulous labels I was using before, so I thought it’d be neat and efficient to label them using the smallest number of characters possible, so I decided to try emoji.
Can you explain what a couple of the labels in your screen grab mean?
Of course! In the screenshot I tweeted, a few of the labels are as follows:
emoji —> meaning
beer —> Did I drink alcohol today?
coffee/tea —> Did I consume caffeine today?
rosary + 20 —> Did I meditate for ~20 minutes?
valley + 30 —> Did I spend ~30 minutes outside today?
OFF + 60 —> Did I turn off/avoid electronic screens ~60 minutes before bed?
book + 60 —> Did I read for ~60 minutes before bed?
Do you think emoji are a more effective way of labeling data?
Subjectively, for personal data or pet projects, I think emoji for data labeling can be very effective. In this way, you’re able to use a minimal amount of characters in a robust fashion that allows for an unambiguous meaning. However, I think it would be difficult to pass this data on to someone else and have them objectively understand it without explicit explanations of the emoji’s meaning in the label.
What do you think of the trend away from five-star reviews to emoji reviews?
I think using emoji in place of five-star reviews could be effective, depending on the context, constraints, and clarity of how they are used.
For example, a “sick” emoji next to a restaurant review tells about that person’s specific experience in a clear way, one that is arguably more effective than “1 star” with an accompanying paragraph, and definitely more effective than just a lone “1 star” review. But, on the other hand, if I see a review for a dentist that’s labeled with an “Easter Island head” emoji, then I’m even more lost than when I started.
There’s no point in sticking with the old school system of reviewing restaurants and rides with stars when emoji can offer other users more nuanced and specific feedback. Facebook and Uber are trying to figure how to make emoji reviews work.
Kristen V. Brown and Cara Rose DeFabio share their take on how and how not to enable emoji reviews.
Just in time for the holidays, Kim Kardashian, queen of the selfie, is releasing her own line of emoji. They are called Kimoji. The emoji include a butt, a doughnut, Kim’s censored boobs, Kim ugly crying, a word cloud featuring Kim calling someone “basic,” a solo cup, Kim taking a selfie, and a hairdryer.
YouTube user darman212 used iOS coding app Hopscotch and Final Cut Pro X to make a version of the Star Wars: The Force Awakens teaser trailer entirely out of emoji. BB-8 is a soccer ball with a bowl of ramen on his head!
Using pictures to represent words dates back to Egyptian hieroglyphics and Chinese pictographs. But in the 1500s in France, a particular format of picture writing called the rebus was invented. A rebus is a word puzzle which uses pictures to represent words (or parts of words). The rebus became very popular in Europe and elsewhere. Here’s a French rebus from 1592:
Alice in Wonderland’s author, Lewis Carroll, was fond of rebuses…here’s the first page of a letter he wrote in 1869:
Compare the rebus with theuseofemoji on mobile devices and social media, like this emoji version of the Fresh Prince of Bel Air theme song:
I went a’dancin’ last night. Beat Radio is going off the air so they threw a little party at First Ave last night called “Beatoff”. It was fun…for the most part…it was a little annoying because of the nature of the crowd. Usually, a techno show at First Ave means a techno crowd; a crowd that comes to dance and experience the event instead of scoping for that night’s lay or getting drunk. Instead, last night’s crowd was very much the typical bar crowd. Sigh. Don’t get me wrong, the music was good (most of the time) and I had fun dancing, but it just wasn’t the most ideal atmosphere to deal with when all I really wanted to do was dance.
Usually when the hype machine is up and running on a film, I tend to be a little sceptical about it, even when I’ve seen it and enjoyed it. A lot of “yeah, I liked it, but….” I love to ride the backlash.
Saving Private Ryan is the hyped movie of the moment. I liked it. That’s it. I liked it. It was a good movie. I don’t care if it’s not the best war picture ever made. Or the bloodiest. Or the most shell shocking. Or if Tom Hanks’ character was too Mr. Goody Two Shoes. It was just good. I went twice and it was good both times. And I’d recommend it to friends.
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