The cover of the March 30th New Yorker, “Clinton’s Emoji” by Barry Blitt:
From the cover story by Mina Kaneko and Françoise Muhly:
“Where would we be without emoticons, emoji, and sideways winky faces typed out of punctuation marks?” Barry Blitt, the artist behind this week’s cover, says. “Seriously, how does anyone understand anything that’s written with only letters?” he continues. “I feel sorry for the alphabet. I’m waiting for the first original novel to be composed solely with emoticons. Oh, and Hillary Clinton.”
From Wikipedia:
Emoji … are the ideograms or smileys used in Japanese electronic messages and Web pages, the use of which is spreading outside Japan. Originally meaning pictograph, the word emoji literally means “picture” (e) + “character” (moji). The characters are used much like ASCII emoticons or kaomoji, but a wider range is provided, and the icons are standardized and built into the handsets. Some emoji are very specific to Japanese culture, such as a bowing businessman, a face wearing a face mask, a white flower used to denote “brilliant homework,” or a group of emoji representing popular foods: ramen noodles, dango, onigiri, Japanese curry, and sushi.
… Although originally only available in Japan, some emoji character sets have been incorporated into Unicode, allowing them to be used elsewhere as well. As a result, some phones such as the Windows Phone and the iPhone, and the Android lines allow access to the symbols without requiring a Japanese carrier. Emoji have also started appearing in emailing services … Apple’s Mac OS X operating system supports emoji as of version 10.7 Lion with the Apple Color Emoji typeface.
There’s an Emojipedia site, with an inventory of all the Unicode emoji characters and their names, including the new Unicode 7.0 emoji (and candidates for Unicode 8.0 emoji).
And on this blog, a 12/31/14 posting on emoji(s). Note: the title of this posting has plural emoji, but the text has plural emojis, and some of the the sites about the characters use one, some the other. The zero plural is a more direct borrowing from Japanese (which has no plural inflection), while the /z/ plural has the word fully nativized in English. The Oxford Dictionaries site accepts both.
Finally, artist Barry Blitt has appeared in one of my Language Log postings, on the New Yorker cover “The Politics of Fear” (with an Obamas fist bump); and in a posting on this blog, with four Blitt New Yorker covers and a Vanity Fair illustration of his.
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