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Darmok And Jalad, Burning A Dictionary
Shaka when the emoji fell, Stuart considered the future of language.
Emoji, Memes, and the future of Language in a nutshell — with a fair amount of emphasis on the nut (noun version).
Exit the Emoji
I am a vehement opponent of the beautiful languages of the world becoming overly polluted with endless, tiny, often irritatingly animated emoji. You can infer this from my intentionally elaborate use of flowery language, naturally.
Not just on the grounds that we don’t all have instant access to emoji on our keyboards¹ or phones but they’re often really small and therefore especially confusing especially when it comes to their context and meaning. (Even more so if your eyesight isn’t getting better with age, as with myself, but let’s not get into that right now).
This leaves emoji generally open to interpretation, them being generally quite drastically misunderstood. Of course, this is anathema to us computing types² who prefer unambiguity in both our lives and our programming languages.
Indeed, that’s just one of them. Put them in a ‘sentence’ if there is such a concept in emoji grammar³ and you can have all kinds of unpleasant and inappropriate misunderstandings as to their possible intended meanings.
