Some people love them. Some people frown upon them and think they are ridiculous. No matter what our opinion, it seems that they are here to stay.  For many of us, they have become second nature and part of our everyday lives, and how we communicate. 

Today, we are going to be talking about the emoji. 

First of all, some questions:

* How would you define an emoji? 

* When and why do you think they were invented?

* Look at the last 5 emojis that you used on your phone. Which ones are they? Are they more positive or negative?

* What percentage of people do you think use emojis online every day?

* Which emojis do you think are the most commonly used?

A little bit about emojis

If you look in the Cambridge dictionary for the definition of emoji you will find the following: “A digital image that is added to a message in electronic communication in order to express a particular idea or feeling.”

We tend to add them automatically to our messages and emails. They are an integral part of our day-to-day lives. However, have you ever wondered why or how they came about? I decided to investigate.

They were invented in the late 90s by Shigetaka Kurita, a Japanese guy who worked for a mobile communication company called  NTT Docomo. 

The company was working on developing a new mobile internet system but they were extremely limited by the number of characters that users could use to communicate per message, there were just 250 characters. In order to take advantage of the number of characters allowed, Kurita came up with the idea of adding pictures to messages. 

The first emojis were born and compared to the current ones were quite primitive, being just 12X12 pixel images and they were limited to food, drink, weather and feelings. They really took off and became hugely popular when they were integrated into iOS by Apple, in the late 2000s.  Unicode then developed a standard code so that all the main platforms like Google, Facebook, and other social networks could develop their own emojis and be recognised by the system. 

Over the years, more and more emojis have been developed. They are becoming more and more inclusive and now cover far more topics than they once did, now including maps, flags, animals, objects, and clothes, to name just a few. 

Have you ever written an entire message just with emojis? It’s incredible what we are able to interpret and express just with images. They say a picture speaks a thousand words and there is no better quote than this, to sum up why we use emojis to communicate. Visual images provoke emotion. Many people express themselves and their emotions better through images. Perhaps we are returning to our roots where cavemen communicated through their cave paintings. 

It’s very easy to misinterpret a text message and the way we understand them can be very subjective. It may depend on our mood or the circumstances we find ourselves in when reading the message. However, just by adding a simple emoji, we can help the person reading our message interpret it in the way we desire. We might be making a joke, we might want to express we are angry or maybe we are just being sarcastic.

Emojis are so universal that it doesn’t matter if you write them in an English sentence or in a French one. They don’t understand language barriers and have no grammar. 

Emoji facts

* Did you know that the word emoji originates from the Japanese translation: Picture (e) character (moji)?

* 3633 emojis existed in Sept 2021.

* It’s estimated that 6 billion emojis are used every single day.

* Emojis that represent specific individuals are prohibited by Unicode no matter if they are alive or dead. 

* ❤️and 😭 are the most commonly used emojis in 2022.

Emoji Fun

Can you guess the English idioms from these emojis?

Find the answers below:

* 🐈+👜+➡️ 

* 🔥+🥔

* 🔪+🐧🐧+⚫️

* 🖐🏻+🐎🐎🐎

* 💶💶💶🦵🏻💪🏻

Grammar Hospital: Common mistakes with adjectives

Emojis are often used to express adjectives. Here are a few common mistakes that students make with adjectives.

* Adjectives never have a plural in English even if the noun is plural.

Reds shoes - Red shoes

* Adjectives always go before nouns, never after. 

The house big is on the corner. 

The big house is on the corner.

* Any adjective that ends in the suffix -ful only ever has one L at the end. Beautiful - Wonderful 

* If you want to qualify an adjective DO NOT use A LOT

“She was a lot beautiful” - You need to use ‘very’ / ‘really’ / ‘so’

“She was really / very / so beautiful”

* As native speakers, we never learn this rule when we study English at school. We just know it. It wasn’t until I started teaching English over 20 years ago that I realised that there was an actual rule! It’s unlikely that you will ever need to add all of these adjective types together in one go but it’s great to know the rule. When you have various adjectives together in English they have to follow a very specific order: 

Use this acronym to help you: OSPSACOMP + Noun

(listen to audio for more explanation)

Opinion- Unusual 

Size - Huge

Physical quality - Shabby

Shape - Square

Age - Old 

Colour - Blue

Origin - Chinese

Material - Plastic 

Purpose - Sewing

Noun - Machine

6. We don’t normally join adjectives together with ‘and’ UNLESS we have the verb to be before them.  

We wouldn’t say: He has a blue and big jacket. 

But, we would say: His jacket is big and blue.

Emoji Fun answers

To let the cat out of the bag - to reveal a secret

Hot potato - a difficult, controversial topic to deal with

To kill two birds with one stone - to achieve two things by doing only one. 

Hold your horses - wait/slow down

To cost an arm and a leg - to be really expensive. 

That’s all for this week folks! Thanks so much for reading and listening. I hope you enjoyed this week’s Woodside Weekly. If you did, please like and share with friends and family. Your support means a lot!

Images courtesy of Canva Pro.

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