Adrienne LaFrance has an eye-opening article about "The Westernization of Emoji" in The Atlantic (5/22/17). Here's the summary statement at the beginning: The takeout box and the fortune cookie are perceived as emblems of Chinese culture, when they’re actually central to the American experience of it.
Message in a store window @ 826 Valencia, San Francisco:
Today's xkcd: Mouseover title: "I'm excited about the proposal to add a 'brontosaurus' emoji codepoint because it has the potential to bring together a half-dozen different groups of pedantic people into a single glorious internet argument."
Austin Ramzy, "Julie Bishop, Foreign Minister of Australia, Raises Eyebrows With Emojis", NYT 10/22/2015: What, exactly, does that scowling, red-faced emoji mean? I’m mad? Frustrated? Sunburned? The question, which has plagued more than a few text-message exchanges, became a topic of debate in the Australian Senate on Thursday, when Foreign Minister Julie Bishop’s liberal […]
Today's announcement from the Google Chrome team (yes, note the date):
I must admit to having enjoyed the series of savage similes about quality of computer program code presented in three xkcd comic strips. They show a female character, known to aficionados as Ponytail, reluctantly agreeing to take a critical look at some code that the male character Cueball has written. Almost at first sight, she […]
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Christopher Alderton saw this flyer on his way to work a few days ago:
In a comment to this post, "A trilingual, biscriptal note (with emoji)" (2/5/17), liuyao remarked, Interesting that 愛 to mean (romantic) love might be a modern invention. A search in Dream of the Red Chamber (which is regarded as Beijing Mandarin in 18th century) reveals that all instances of it are in fact "to like" […]
The following ghastly photographs of a rat that was caught stealing from a convenience store in Heyuan, Guangdong province have gone viral on Chinese social media. =============================================== WARNING: viewer discretion advised. The photographs following the page break may be upsetting to some readers. ===============================================
From an anonymous reader, who spotted this photograph on Instagram, where it was posted by nanorie, who has given her permission to repost it:
The Oxford Dictionaries 2016 Word Of The Year is post-truth, which they define as "relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief". Here's their graph of its recent rise in frequency over the past seven months:
According to a press release sent out earlier today, Today Oxford Dictionaries announces the emoji, commonly known as “Face with Tears of Joy,” as its “Word” of the Year for 2015. They explain that This year Oxford University Press partnered with leading mobile technology business SwiftKey to explore frequency and usage statistics for some of […]