Fans and brands are crying ‘face with tears of joy’ icons Emoji-mania

By LEANNE ITALIE

Associated Press

NEW YORK

When it comes to emojis, the future is very, very ... Face with Tears of Joy.

If you don’t know what that means then you: A. aren’t a 14-year-old girl. B. love to hate those tiny pictures that people text you all the time. Or C. are nowhere near a smartphone or online chat.

Otherwise, here in 2016, it’s all emojis, all the time. And Face with Tears of Joy, by the way, is a bright yellow happy face with a classic, toothy grin as tears fall.

The Face was chosen by Oxford Dictionaries as its 2015 “word” of the year, based on its popularity and reflecting the rise of emojis to help charitable causes, promote businesses and generally assist oh-so-many-more of us in further expressing ourselves on social media and in texts.

The Beyhive knows. The collective fan base of Beyonce recently spammed Amber Rose with little bumblebee emojis when they sensed a diss of their queen.

Taco Bell also knows. Emoji overseers approved a taco character last year after a yearlong campaign by the company to get one up and running, rewarding users of said taco on Twitter with gifts of free photos, GIFs and other virtual playthings to celebrate.

So what’s it all about? Here’s a look at the past, present and rosy future of emojis:

WHERE DID THEY COME FROM?

While there’s now a strict definition of emojis as images created through standardized computer coding that works across platforms, they have many, many popular cousins by way of “stickers,” which are images without the wonky back end. Kimojis, the invention of Kim Kardashian, aren’t technically emojis, for instance, at least in the eyes of purists.

In tech lore, the great emoji explosion has a grandfather in Japan and his name is Shigetaka Kurita. He was inspired in the 1990s by manja and kanji when he and others on a team working to develop what is considered the world’s first widespread mobile Internet platform came up with some rudimentary characters. They were working a good decade before Apple developed a set of emojis for the first iPhones.

Emojis are either loads of fun or the bane of your existence. One thing is sure: There’s no worry they’ll become a “language” in and of themselves. While everybody from Coca-Cola to the Kitten Bowl have come up with little pictographs to whip up interest in themselves, emojis exist mainly to nuance the words regular folk type, standing in for tone of voice, facial expressions and physical gestures – extended middle finger emoji added recently.

“Words aren’t dead. Long live the emoji, long live the word,” laughed Gretchen McCulloch, a Toronto linguist who, like some others in her field, is studying emojis and other aspects of Internet language.

Emojis have been compared to hieroglyphs, but McCulloch is not on board. That ancient picture-speak included symbols with literal meaning, but others stood in for actual sound.

Emoji enthusiasts have played with telling word-free stories using their little darlings alone and translating song lyrics into the pictures, “but they can’t be put together like letters to make a pronounceable word,” McCulloch said.

THE EMOJI OVERSEERS

Back when Kurita was creating some of the first emojis, chaos already had ensued in trying to make all the pagers and all the emerging mobile phones and the newfangled thing called email and everything else Internet-ish that was bubbling up speak to each other. And also to allow people in Japan used to a more formal way of communicating make themselves understood in the emerging shorthand.

Enter the Unicode Consortium, on the coding end. It’s a volunteer nonprofit industry organization working in collaboration with the International Organization for Standardization, the latter an independent non-governmental body that helps develop specifications for all sorts of things, including emojis, on a global scale.

Unicode, co-founded and headed by Mark Davis in Zurich, has a big, big mission, of which emojis have a place: making sure all the languages in the world are encoded and supported across platforms and devices.

The key word here is volunteer. Davis has a whole other job at Google, but he has dedicated himself to the task above. He also co-chairs the consortium’s emoji subcommittee, a cog in a vetting process for new emojis.