Emojis and communication.

Everyone's all crazy about emojis.

Either people hate the things and believe that their use is another sign of the apocalypse, or they love them and find them a useful, quick way to communicate that transcends language. Evidence of this split in opinion can be seen by the universally panned Emoji Movie last year, which took home four Golden Raspberries and still grossed $217.8 million on a $50 million budget. Or take the case of the giant fight at the Unicode Consortium over making a poop emoji that frowns. Emotions (and emoticons) are running high on our little emotive friends.

Although I had some stern words for emoji pants a couple of years ago, I confess that for texting they're a fun and quick way to communicate. Any married man can find out quickly by text that he's in the doghouse:

ME: 😀
WIFE: 😡
ME: 😰

(In these examples I'm using the emojis Google provides for Blogger, but they're similar to the ones on my iPhone.)

In a way, emojis have provided what Esperanto had always promised, an international means of communication. Yet even with emojis, cultural things can be baffling. What are these?

⛉🎴⛛⛕🏣⛿

The red card is a playing card, but not a common look for the US. The building is a Japanese post office. But I only knew what they were because I read the descriptions... in English.

Some emojis are up to no good, too. The difference between a hotel and a "love hotel" (hot-sheet palace, hourly rental, no-tell motel, etc.) can be seen here:

🏨 🏩 

While that might get the message across to your Tinder buddy, emojis are not great at more subtle communication -- although many find subtlety between faces like 😲and 😳, 😸 and 😹, or 😃 and 😄.

But can they really communicate more poetic thought? Try this:

👦🏃⛅
☁👆🌄
😲
🜚🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻
🌊🌲🌳
🍃💃🌬

Of course that translates to:

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

By Wordsworth, as any college freshman could tell you back when college students studied dead white guy writers. 💀👱✏📕

It's fine to emjoicize it, but there's no poetry there. I had to use sunflowers for daffodils because there's no daffodil emoji. Really, it's quite limiting. When it comes to emojis, a picture is worth maybe one word, or even half of one.

Ultimately, I think emojis have their place, although perhaps not on the movie screen.

Will emojis ever go away? Probably not, as long as texting remains the dominant method of telecommunications in our culture. They're too useful as shorthand. Their popularity in other media, however, may have reached a high-water mark already.

Which, for people who love them, would be 😢.