An Open Letter to the Purveyors of Nonsensical Emoji

Dear Emoji Overlords.

Let’s cut straight to the chase. It’s time. We’re all adults, we can deal with it: Give us a penis emoji and allow the long suffering aubergine emoji to just be… a freakin’ aubergine. I literally can’t invite anyone over for an eggplant pasta anymore without appearing to be some crazed sex fiend offering up an Italian themed orgy, (and when I do coincidently organise an italian themed orgy, people now expect eggplant pasta. It’s a nightmare) And don’t get me started on having to use the peach emoji as a substitute for a vagina, I mean honestly, if you’re not going to grow up and put in an actual vagina emoji, at least get some better yonic shaped objects in there. (thats right, google it — it’s a word)

Also, I know you had the best intentions with the dancing salsa woman in the red dress. I bet you thought people would use that to tell their friends that they were starting salsa lessons, or at a stretch, how they might look in a new red dress they just bought… while dancing — sure, that seems like an insanely overly specific use for an emoji, but then again you literally have an aeroplane seat emoji, just in case you need to explain to someone that you’re sitting in an aeroplane but without wanting to use the three emoji’s you have for aeroplanes, which I might add, we don’t even need by the way — the nauseatingly smug ‘photo of the wing through the window’ instagram shot tends to say everything it needs to.

Anyway, here’s the thing about the red dress salsa dancing girl — we’ve been using that one (for quite some time now I might add) as a proclamation that we’re about to go out and get utterly fucked up beyond belief, and then when we wake up the next afternoon to the seventeenth unanswered phone call from a concerned work colleague, we’re going to use it again, along with that other emoji of the woman doing the weird upward facing palm thing with her hand to explain that “this shit just happens sometimes” and that we “really just don’t give any fucks about it” — Hell, that one is so obscure that we honestly don’t even know what it was supposed to mean originally. — seriously, well done.

Speaking of making bad decisions, those little ‘hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil’ monkeys are cute — but just so you know, they’re being used to lighten up some pretty horrible text based confessions. Sure, I know it sounds bad that I slept with Janet from marketing while her husband was upstairs at the work party last week, but hey, guess what? That little monkey with his hands over his face just made that entire thing sound not so bad — I’m telling you, there’s nothing like an embarrassed primate to iron a major discrepancy out to nothing more than a little moral slip up. Sure, Janet’s pregnant now and her husband is confused because they stopped having sex years ago, which explains a lot, but you know what? — I’m employing that monkey with his ears covered up to deal with that news, because I do not need to hear that shit right now.

I know, I know — is must be upsetting to learn that we’ve taken all your hard work and reappropriated it into a sordid, debaucherous language of our own, but that’s what happens when you leave us to our own devices… literally, and then pack those devices full of completely nonsensical pictures of things we’d normally never use, but have some weird compulsive need to utilise in the worst way possible.

There needs to be some serious house cleaning. For instance: Three different coloured books with different volumes on them? That’s just excessive. It also seems utterly pointless, given that nobody reads anything anymore, let alone anything involving three volumes. Meanwhile, you’ve completely failed to represent anything in emoji form that might allude to the fifth season of a TV show, which let’s be honest, if far more likely to be experienced by someone who communicates in emoji than the third volume of an actual book, with actual words. I mean, most people have given up on the Game of Thrones books and are now watching the show instead, and that even includes the guy who’s supposed to be writing them.

Furthermore, I know all this is originally a japanese invention, but if you haven’t noticed, we’re a global community now, and frankly, it’s only really the Japanese that need five different emoji’s for sushi and another eight, eight! emoji’s for trains. Meanwhile, you’ve only got one emoji for snowflakes, which I can assure you the Inuit are furious about, as you’ve literally ignored 90% of their vocabulary (if common misconceptions and unsubstantiated rumours about their vocabulary are to be believed)

Anyway, after several unanswered phone calls to your headquarters about all this, I decided to arrive in person in the hope that I might be able to speak to someone behind this unmitigated mess. Unfortunately for me, (and my travel allowance), I wasn’t expecting your headquarters to consist of a fortified compound inside a mountain, situated about a 90 euro taxi ride outside of Geneva. (Great view though, I must say)

Sadly, once I finally arrived I completely failed to get past the heavily armed, square jawed man in fetching alpine camouflage guarding the entrance. I should also note that his lovely German Shepherd guard dog is apparently called ‘Gold-Finger’, confirming that the hilariously clichéd location of your office isn’t lost on your employees either.

So, having failed to penetrate the highly secretive world inhabited by the purveyors of text based visual language, I’ve resorted to writing this open letter to you in the vain hope that you have some kind of contact with the goings-on of the outside world and might somehow receive this, which, given the nonsensical array of emoji’s you’ve provided the rest of humanity with over the years, I suspect you probably don’t.