A posting in which I realize, once again, that an emoji (say, the vomiting (face) emoji) can look different on different platforms (in this case, Facebook vs. Microsoft Word), even though you use the same code to call it up — an effect that’s analogous to a letter of the alphabet (say, the lower-case letter whose English name is /ti/) looking different in different fonts (notably, being serifed in some, sans serif in others). And even more distantly analogous to a phoneme of a language, in a specifc position (say, /t/ after an accented vowel and before an unaccented syllable, as in battle and blotto), being pronounced differently in different social varieties of the language (as an voiceless stop in BrE but a voiced tap in AmE). Autres lieux, autres moeurs.
The emoji action went down this morning on Facebook, prompted by Gadi Niram getting set off by US Senator Tommy Tuberville’s having ceased his months-long blocking of a big pile of military promotions (for a reason that has nothing to do with the merits of the promotions). The FB exchange:
— GN: I don’t know what reaction to use here, because in no way does he deserve even the appearance of praise.
— Tim Evanson: I tend to use [emoji] for him.
— AZ > TE:
— TE > AZ: I don’t know. I just pick it visually from the list. “Vomit” maybe? Or “Sick”?
— AZ > TE: Apparently a greener variant of the vomiting (face) emoji, in which the face is all yellow. I can’t reproduce the yellow variant here, because FB automatically gives this variant, while Microsoft Word automatically gives the yellow variant 🤮 (so I can’t reproduce your emoji in a Word file). Bizarre. I like your variant better. It’s a combo of the yellow-faced vomiting emoji and the nauseated emoji 🤢 (which is all green-faced in Word; more bizarreness). On FB:
Like I said: different places, different practices.
December 6, 2023 at 5:19 pm |
Emojipedia calls it the “face vomiting” emoji and lists a number of variants here: https://emojipedia.org/face-vomiting#designs