Emoting

I suppose you could say emojis have always been a part of our culture. 

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons*

Yes, I realize the modern emojis were created in chatrooms in the 1990s, when folks started playing with the characters on their keyboard to make silly faces. Which they used to enhance otherwise graphic-less communication. (After all, exclamation marks can only get you so far). 

A little digging told me the story of the emoji. These are the quick facts:

• Shigetaka Kurita, a Japanese designer, is credited with creating modern emojis. There were originally 176 emojis designed for the Japanese cell phone company, DOCOMO, which used them for cell phones and pagers in 1999. 
• The word "emoji" comes from two Japanese words: letter and picture. (No, there was no connection with the English word "emotion.")
• Kurita was inspired in part by the Zapf Dingbats typeface and by graphic novels when he designed his first library of emojis. 
• You can see the original bank of emojis at the Museum of Modern Art.
• The most-used emoji is the "face with tears of joy":  😂 Today, you can also get the cat version: 😹
• Emoji" became word of the year in 2015.
• World Emoji Day is July 17. If you look closely at the calendar emoji, you'll see that date on it. July 17 was chosen because that's when iCal for Mac was introduced at the 2002 MacWorld Expo.
• Mr. Ginley's favorite emoji is what he calls the "kissing chicken": 😘

While the emoji clearly resides in the modern world, there are clearly predecessors.

There was the smiley face, created by Harvey Ross Ball in 1963 as an icon to boost employee morale. (It took him 10 minutes to come up with the graphic, for which he was paid $45.)

When girls used to pass notes back in the day, they would punctuate their messages with little hearts (sometimes as the dot in the letter "I" (as in "ick"). 

Many of us have used XXXOOO for kisses and hugs. And I've been known to add a face or doodle to notes to my family.

But before any of this, there were those wacky funsters, the medieval scribes. Under the heading of "monks just wanna have fun," these doodles were done when the scribe wanted to test the new nibs on their writing implements. There's a fascinating article by CNN about these 700-year-old "cheeky doodles," if you're interested. 

In the meantime, have a nice day! 

*Photo credit: GorillaSushi from Aurora, IL, US, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons