I e-mailed my brother some information and he responded with this:
Any clue?
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65 Comments
Isn’t it wonderful how technology has improved our abilities to communicate?
Precisely, Arthur!
I’m a writer, he’s a writer, yet instead of using words, we communicate through tiny drawings only one of us understands.
Though on the other hand, I guess, BECAUSE OF technology, I can immediately ask several thousand people for help understanding this.
Maybe I’m wrong but I think it has a “fight the power” kind of meaning to it. Like I picture attached to those fists three arms raised in defiance.
It’s so obvious a 5-year old could figure it out.
Quick – find me a 5-year old, I can’t make head nor tail out of it…
I’d assume confirmation.
But you could ask him.
And give him the satisfaction, woozy???
I’m thinking it represents a protest march in Springfield.
I thought it was ASL (American sign language) for e e e. Alternate possibility: knock, knock, knock.
It looks like “Right on, right on, right on!”
Solidarity brother!
“. . . we communicate through tiny drawings only one of us understands.”
In addition, my email program won’t parse/show emojis, so they are all little squares. I have no idea if someone is sending me smiles, frowns, smirks, raised middle fingers . . .
“Though on the other hand, I guess, BECAUSE OF technology, I can immediately ask several thousand people for help understanding this.”
Not much help, really, when each one of those thousand people has a different interpretation . . .
Picard and dathon at el-adrel.
👍🐴🔋📎
“I’m thinking it represents a protest march in Springfield.”
That is a very likely meaning.
Https//:emojis.wiki/raised-fist – not that I knew about the site before this CIDU showed up, but it looks useful.
Hmmm… why didn’t WordPress create the linky?
guero: Should have been colon-slash-slash, not slash-slash-colon
You busted the link. The colon is out of place. You wanted this:
Mark, actually I did consider the possibility that it represented the Springfield Olympic Team, but I wasn’t sure how that could have applied here.
chemgal, my first thought was ASL for s s s.
beckoningchasm, “Right on” was my second thought, but I think that would work with one, but not three.
So far, we don’t seem to have any obviously correct interpretations for a reply to information.
@ MiB – I find it incredibly insensitive that the standards organizations have approved all these “body part” emojis exclusively in caucasian skin tones. I think it’s time for us all to go to the barricades, and fight for a complete range of racially inclusive emojis, so that it would be clear which kind of “power” that “raised fist” is supposed to indicate.
P.S. While we’re at it, we should also get them to add a “white poop” emoji. I’m sure it would be just as useful as the current version.
…@kilby, I assume you’re joking – but you do know that the latest wonderfulest thing is emoji with adjustable skin tone? Of course it only works in certain apps (all Apple, I think) and then only to people with the same app, but… It was a big news thing…a year or so ago. Heh, looked it up – 2015, actually.
@ jjmcgaffey – I figured it would be kind of hypocritical to append a smiley onto a sarcastic snark expressing how tiresome I think the whole emoji circus is.
Emoji are a high-context communication form. I can’t even speculate on the meaning of the answer without knowing the question.
Yes, I was just going to write – context is everything.
Guero, Winter, Brian: Thanks for that useful site. One thing I admired there is that they’re not afraid to use “emojis” as the plural. It’s very normal for an adopted word to develop new forms within the target language, often including regularization of various grammatical inflections.
In her new book, Because Internet, (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36739320-because-internet) Gretchen McCulloch alleges that emojis are a good thing, because they are the functional equivalent to gesture in speech, and gesture, as an accompaniment to speech is, if not essential, still an important component of it, that has been missing in communication by texting.
Just began that book; haven’t gotten to the emoji chapter yet, but I think I’ll just skip to it directly now.
And she and her “LingThusiasm” podcast partner now have two video episodes up on YouTube. The gestures one is at https://youtu.be/u8dHtr7uLHs
I’ve been told MANY a time that if my hands were tied, I couldn’t talk.
@Mitch4 re: loan word pluralization: I just came across one that really discombobulated me in a book I’m reading — he’s refering to the German state subunits, the Bundisländer, and he writes Länders (in italics). Except in German, the singular is Land, the plural is <Länder — the umlaut does most of the work. So to have Länders (with an English pluralizing “s”) is just very… weird.
Except, BillR, people generally understand speech and facial gestures instinctively, while emojis are often seemingly-random symbols.
” people generally understand speech and facial gestures instinctively”
No they don’t, because different groups assign different meanings to different gestures. This means they’re learned, not instinctual. (plus, of course, we can learn facial gestures of other species.)
Interesting case, larK. You call it a loan word, and it was in italics, so I agree it would have been better off as a straightforward German plural.
I would differentiate my case for “emojis”, first of all, by claiming
“emoji” is no longer a loan word, but has been adopted into English. Also, of course I’m not making a prescriptive stance that the invariant “emoji” is no longer the correct plural and the nativised “emojis” should supplant it. [Though I confess that’s probably what I would like to see, eventually.] It was more a claim that both forms seem to be popularly acceptable at this point.
It’s a well-worn subtopic, but the plural of an abbreviation of a term that has an odd plural came over the radio waves to me just today. Sorry about stacking up those descriptions, what I’m taliking about is “the Attorneys General of another 27 states have agreed to […]”. But then after they go on to speak of “the A.G.”, how will that go into the plural? We;;, these newsies said “A.G.s” and I have to agree that was the only sensible way to say it. In writing there might be some reason to make it weirder, but I hope not.
As a pretty-often-encountered back-formed singular, have you seen “verticie” in graph-theory homework?
“Generally,” James: we all know what it means when we see a real-life :) or :( . And I’m not sure facial gestures tend to be voluntary.
HAND GESTURES, on the other hand, are a minefield.
“we all know what it means when we see a real-life 🙂”
Except that we don’t all know. We don’t all agree what it means when we see your “real-life 🙂”
When a deaf kid signs a dirty word, do you wash out his hands with soap?
The same question comes up in baseball with the Run Batted In, commonly called RBI. What’s the plural? is it RBI (fro Runs Batted In), or RBIs?
” Run Batted In, commonly called RBI. What’s the plural?”
Ribbies.
On the subject of emoji skin tones, I’m curious what people see here:
✊🏻✊🏽✊🏿
I’m posting in Safari on macOS 10.4 “Mojave”. The first is very light skin tone, maybe Scandinavian; the second is medium skin tone, maybe mixed-race African American or south Asian; the third is dark skin tone. I’m wondering what comes through on other platforms — Apple or non-Apple. Of course, it also has to get through WordPress.
I have a friend with an iPhone who’s constantly sending me emojis that NEVER come through.
Nevertheless, she persists.
“On the subject of emoji skin tones, I’m curious what people see here:”
I see nine rectangles, all alike.
Hmm, I see them as three fist emojis in the colors as jajizi described. That’s in three different systems.
At other times, when viewing on Android a skintone emoji not yet implemented there, I have seen the correct emoji character but in a default color, followed by a square color patch of the intended tone. This relates to how an emoji with modification is assembled for transmission ; the codes are separate and sequential.
On the subject of emoji skin tones, I’m curious what people see here
Approximately what you describe, Firefox for Windows desktop.
With a different browser, I see only 6 rectangles, and they have what I assume are hex values in them – three the same and three which differ from each other in the last digit.
@ jajizi – I see the icon colors, but this is with Safari (iOS 12).
P.S. I was very puzzled why you would still be using MacOS 10.4; even on an old PPC machine that I still have, I was able to update it to 10.5.8. However, when I looked up “Mojave”, I discovered that it was just a typo (for 10.14).
Well, given that 45 revolutions per minute is 45 RPM and not 45 RsPM and not 45 RPMs I would say that 17 runs batted in is 17 RBI.
Well for me the puzzling aspect of Andréa’s latest addition is the name “Professor Hawking”. And in the context of communication tools. This brings to mind Stephen Hawking and his generated voice. But that doesn’t seem to fit the intent of the cartoon.
I see it as HawkinS . . .
Right you are! (When I blow it up enough.) Still makes for a little odd chain of association.
So BillR already mentioned Gretchen McCulloch’s Because Internet; I just happened to be reading it now, and I will quote a paragraph from it that is apposite (and because of the challenge inherent in copying this paragraph):
Emoji have the same rhythmic tendency as beat gestures. That’s what the repetition is telling us. We type 😘😘😘 because we might also blow multiple kisses, we type 👍👍👍👍 because when we give the thumbs-up gesture, we sometimes do it rhythmically or hold it up for several seconds to emphasize it. Like how we can extend the letters of a word for emphasis, even when the result is unpronounceable (“sameeeee”), we can repeat even those emoji that don’t have direct gestural correlates, like the skull 💀 or the smiling pile of poo 💩 or the sparkle heart 💖, because we’ve generalized this behavior to the category as a whole.
[page 171]
I tried to read this book, but gave up. However, thanks for that paragraph . . . and as for the emphasis by extending letters of a word – I do that often. In fact, one of my dogs was named Luuceee, because of the Ricky Ricardo pronunciation (her full name was Luuceee You Got Some ‘Splainin’ To Do).
Lucy is the dog in the excellent movie “Wendy and Lucy”. She also had supporting appearances in a couple other movies directed by Kelly Reichardt.
Don’t watch movies, ESPECIALLY ones with dog(s) in ’em. I still remember my Mom taking me – screaming and crying (me, not her) – out of ‘Bambi’ and telling me she was NEVER taking me to a movie again. Gee, maybe THAT’s why I don’t like going to movies??
She also had to take away any books with dogs, horses or other animals in them, and also Anderson’s Fairy Tales. Mind you, I was young at the time, but I’ve never gotten over animal deaths in movies or books, even tho I know – INTELLECTUALLY – they are faked.
” I’ve never gotten over animal deaths in movies or books, even tho I know – INTELLECTUALLY – they are faked.”
If you don’t watch movies, then you don’t know that most movies that have animals in them carry, in their end-credits, an endorsement from the ASPCA saying that the animal actors were monitored by an ASPCA rep and that no harm came to any animal featured in the film.
Which, of course, brings up the REASON why such endorsements are necessary. It was mostly Western movies, and horses which were mistreated. In particular, many of them featured a scene involving gunplay between a character fleeting on horseback, and a pursuing mob. The fleeting person would shoot into the crowd pursuing, and BOOM! on of the pursuing horses falls down. The trick for doing this is to trip the horse, which sometimes has no effects other than scaring the horse, and (alas) sometimes produces injuries, including injuries sufficiently serious as to require destroying the animal. The filmmakers treated such an event as a calamity… because it interfered with shooting schedules. Oddly, you don’t see this type of scene much any more, now that the ASPCA is watching.
Andrea, I’m not saying you need to see movies, or this one in particular, but I will note that “Wendy and Lucy” does not abuse animals , and does not abuse the audience either. It is not happy-happy-happy all the time, but Lucy does not die, and she is not actually lost, though Wendy thinks she might be for a time.
I was once on a forum of some sort , where a guy apologized for soliciting a spoiler, but had to ask about this movie because his wife just would not see a movie with animal characters if they die or the overall story has an unhappy outcome for them. So since then I have made a point of disclosing those facts about this movie, spoiler aversion be damned.
James, what was the recent case of some kind of prestige big-deal project that was suspended, and maybe finally cancelled, for charges of horse maltreatment?
“James, what was…”
Hellafino. Maybe Google does.
I thought you were commenting on the name Lucy vs Luuceee ‘-)
Also worth mentioning (though I suppose not for those who never go to any movies) is the wonderful performance by Michelle Williams as Wendy. This was fairly early in her post-television career, and really showed what she could do emotionally. The director, Kelly Reichardt, has subsequently used her a couple more times.
Comics I Don't Understand 
Isn’t it wonderful how technology has improved our abilities to communicate?
Precisely, Arthur!
I’m a writer, he’s a writer, yet instead of using words, we communicate through tiny drawings only one of us understands.
Though on the other hand, I guess, BECAUSE OF technology, I can immediately ask several thousand people for help understanding this.
Maybe I’m wrong but I think it has a “fight the power” kind of meaning to it. Like I picture attached to those fists three arms raised in defiance.
It’s so obvious a 5-year old could figure it out.
Quick – find me a 5-year old, I can’t make head nor tail out of it…
I’d assume confirmation.
But you could ask him.
And give him the satisfaction, woozy???
I’m thinking it represents a protest march in Springfield.
I thought it was ASL (American sign language) for e e e. Alternate possibility: knock, knock, knock.
It looks like “Right on, right on, right on!”
Solidarity brother!
“. . . we communicate through tiny drawings only one of us understands.”
In addition, my email program won’t parse/show emojis, so they are all little squares. I have no idea if someone is sending me smiles, frowns, smirks, raised middle fingers . . .
“Though on the other hand, I guess, BECAUSE OF technology, I can immediately ask several thousand people for help understanding this.”
Not much help, really, when each one of those thousand people has a different interpretation . . .
Picard and dathon at el-adrel.
👍🐴🔋📎
“I’m thinking it represents a protest march in Springfield.”
That is a very likely meaning.
Https//:emojis.wiki/raised-fist – not that I knew about the site before this CIDU showed up, but it looks useful.
Hmmm… why didn’t WordPress create the linky?
guero: Should have been colon-slash-slash, not slash-slash-colon
You busted the link. The colon is out of place. You wanted this:
https://emojis.wiki/raised-fist/
Mark, actually I did consider the possibility that it represented the Springfield Olympic Team, but I wasn’t sure how that could have applied here.
chemgal, my first thought was ASL for s s s.
beckoningchasm, “Right on” was my second thought, but I think that would work with one, but not three.
So far, we don’t seem to have any obviously correct interpretations for a reply to information.
@ MiB – I find it incredibly insensitive that the standards organizations have approved all these “body part” emojis exclusively in caucasian skin tones. I think it’s time for us all to go to the barricades, and fight for a complete range of racially inclusive emojis, so that it would be clear which kind of “power” that “raised fist” is supposed to indicate.
P.S. While we’re at it, we should also get them to add a “white poop” emoji. I’m sure it would be just as useful as the current version.
…@kilby, I assume you’re joking – but you do know that the latest wonderfulest thing is emoji with adjustable skin tone? Of course it only works in certain apps (all Apple, I think) and then only to people with the same app, but… It was a big news thing…a year or so ago. Heh, looked it up – 2015, actually.
@ jjmcgaffey – I figured it would be kind of hypocritical to append a smiley onto a sarcastic snark expressing how tiresome I think the whole emoji circus is.
Emoji are a high-context communication form. I can’t even speculate on the meaning of the answer without knowing the question.
Yes, I was just going to write – context is everything.
Guero, Winter, Brian: Thanks for that useful site. One thing I admired there is that they’re not afraid to use “emojis” as the plural. It’s very normal for an adopted word to develop new forms within the target language, often including regularization of various grammatical inflections.
In her new book, Because Internet, (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36739320-because-internet) Gretchen McCulloch alleges that emojis are a good thing, because they are the functional equivalent to gesture in speech, and gesture, as an accompaniment to speech is, if not essential, still an important component of it, that has been missing in communication by texting.
Just began that book; haven’t gotten to the emoji chapter yet, but I think I’ll just skip to it directly now.
And she and her “LingThusiasm” podcast partner now have two video episodes up on YouTube. The gestures one is at https://youtu.be/u8dHtr7uLHs
I’ve been told MANY a time that if my hands were tied, I couldn’t talk.
@Mitch4 re: loan word pluralization: I just came across one that really discombobulated me in a book I’m reading — he’s refering to the German state subunits, the Bundisländer, and he writes Länders (in italics). Except in German, the singular is Land, the plural is <Länder — the umlaut does most of the work. So to have Länders (with an English pluralizing “s”) is just very… weird.
Except, BillR, people generally understand speech and facial gestures instinctively, while emojis are often seemingly-random symbols.
” people generally understand speech and facial gestures instinctively”
No they don’t, because different groups assign different meanings to different gestures. This means they’re learned, not instinctual. (plus, of course, we can learn facial gestures of other species.)
Interesting case, larK. You call it a loan word, and it was in italics, so I agree it would have been better off as a straightforward German plural.
I would differentiate my case for “emojis”, first of all, by claiming
“emoji” is no longer a loan word, but has been adopted into English. Also, of course I’m not making a prescriptive stance that the invariant “emoji” is no longer the correct plural and the nativised “emojis” should supplant it. [Though I confess that’s probably what I would like to see, eventually.] It was more a claim that both forms seem to be popularly acceptable at this point.
It’s a well-worn subtopic, but the plural of an abbreviation of a term that has an odd plural came over the radio waves to me just today. Sorry about stacking up those descriptions, what I’m taliking about is “the Attorneys General of another 27 states have agreed to […]”. But then after they go on to speak of “the A.G.”, how will that go into the plural? We;;, these newsies said “A.G.s” and I have to agree that was the only sensible way to say it. In writing there might be some reason to make it weirder, but I hope not.
As a pretty-often-encountered back-formed singular, have you seen “verticie” in graph-theory homework?
“Generally,” James: we all know what it means when we see a real-life :) or :( . And I’m not sure facial gestures tend to be voluntary.
HAND GESTURES, on the other hand, are a minefield.
“we all know what it means when we see a real-life 🙂”
Except that we don’t all know. We don’t all agree what it means when we see your “real-life 🙂”
When a deaf kid signs a dirty word, do you wash out his hands with soap?
I happened to come across this today. Maybe it’s who Bill needs:
https://i.chzbgr.com/full/9362259456/h94DC170D/
📡❌👁️🍩👊✋
Re: Attorneys General/AGs
The same question comes up in baseball with the Run Batted In, commonly called RBI. What’s the plural? is it RBI (fro Runs Batted In), or RBIs?
” Run Batted In, commonly called RBI. What’s the plural?”
Ribbies.
On the subject of emoji skin tones, I’m curious what people see here:
✊🏻✊🏽✊🏿
I’m posting in Safari on macOS 10.4 “Mojave”. The first is very light skin tone, maybe Scandinavian; the second is medium skin tone, maybe mixed-race African American or south Asian; the third is dark skin tone. I’m wondering what comes through on other platforms — Apple or non-Apple. Of course, it also has to get through WordPress.
I have a friend with an iPhone who’s constantly sending me emojis that NEVER come through.
Nevertheless, she persists.
“On the subject of emoji skin tones, I’m curious what people see here:”
I see nine rectangles, all alike.
Hmm, I see them as three fist emojis in the colors as jajizi described. That’s in three different systems.
At other times, when viewing on Android a skintone emoji not yet implemented there, I have seen the correct emoji character but in a default color, followed by a square color patch of the intended tone. This relates to how an emoji with modification is assembled for transmission ; the codes are separate and sequential.
On the subject of emoji skin tones, I’m curious what people see here
Approximately what you describe, Firefox for Windows desktop.
With a different browser, I see only 6 rectangles, and they have what I assume are hex values in them – three the same and three which differ from each other in the last digit.
@ jajizi – I see the icon colors, but this is with Safari (iOS 12).
P.S. I was very puzzled why you would still be using MacOS 10.4; even on an old PPC machine that I still have, I was able to update it to 10.5.8. However, when I looked up “Mojave”, I discovered that it was just a typo (for 10.14).
Well, given that 45 revolutions per minute is 45 RPM and not 45 RsPM and not 45 RPMs I would say that 17 runs batted in is 17 RBI.
How ’bout these?
https://safr.kingfeatures.com/api/img.php?e=gif&s=c&file=Wml0cy8yMDE5LzA5L1ppdHMuMjAxOTA5MzBfMTUzNi5naWY=
Did you ever find out exactly what he meant?
Well for me the puzzling aspect of Andréa’s latest addition is the name “Professor Hawking”. And in the context of communication tools. This brings to mind Stephen Hawking and his generated voice. But that doesn’t seem to fit the intent of the cartoon.
I see it as HawkinS . . .
Right you are! (When I blow it up enough.) Still makes for a little odd chain of association.
So BillR already mentioned Gretchen McCulloch’s Because Internet; I just happened to be reading it now, and I will quote a paragraph from it that is apposite (and because of the challenge inherent in copying this paragraph):
Emoji have the same rhythmic tendency as beat gestures. That’s what the repetition is telling us. We type 😘😘😘 because we might also blow multiple kisses, we type 👍👍👍👍 because when we give the thumbs-up gesture, we sometimes do it rhythmically or hold it up for several seconds to emphasize it. Like how we can extend the letters of a word for emphasis, even when the result is unpronounceable (“sameeeee”), we can repeat even those emoji that don’t have direct gestural correlates, like the skull 💀 or the smiling pile of poo 💩 or the sparkle heart 💖, because we’ve generalized this behavior to the category as a whole.
[page 171]
I tried to read this book, but gave up. However, thanks for that paragraph . . . and as for the emphasis by extending letters of a word – I do that often. In fact, one of my dogs was named Luuceee, because of the Ricky Ricardo pronunciation (her full name was Luuceee You Got Some ‘Splainin’ To Do).
Lucy is the dog in the excellent movie “Wendy and Lucy”. She also had supporting appearances in a couple other movies directed by Kelly Reichardt.
Don’t watch movies, ESPECIALLY ones with dog(s) in ’em. I still remember my Mom taking me – screaming and crying (me, not her) – out of ‘Bambi’ and telling me she was NEVER taking me to a movie again. Gee, maybe THAT’s why I don’t like going to movies??
She also had to take away any books with dogs, horses or other animals in them, and also Anderson’s Fairy Tales. Mind you, I was young at the time, but I’ve never gotten over animal deaths in movies or books, even tho I know – INTELLECTUALLY – they are faked.
” I’ve never gotten over animal deaths in movies or books, even tho I know – INTELLECTUALLY – they are faked.”
If you don’t watch movies, then you don’t know that most movies that have animals in them carry, in their end-credits, an endorsement from the ASPCA saying that the animal actors were monitored by an ASPCA rep and that no harm came to any animal featured in the film.
Which, of course, brings up the REASON why such endorsements are necessary. It was mostly Western movies, and horses which were mistreated. In particular, many of them featured a scene involving gunplay between a character fleeting on horseback, and a pursuing mob. The fleeting person would shoot into the crowd pursuing, and BOOM! on of the pursuing horses falls down. The trick for doing this is to trip the horse, which sometimes has no effects other than scaring the horse, and (alas) sometimes produces injuries, including injuries sufficiently serious as to require destroying the animal. The filmmakers treated such an event as a calamity… because it interfered with shooting schedules. Oddly, you don’t see this type of scene much any more, now that the ASPCA is watching.
Andrea, I’m not saying you need to see movies, or this one in particular, but I will note that “Wendy and Lucy” does not abuse animals , and does not abuse the audience either. It is not happy-happy-happy all the time, but Lucy does not die, and she is not actually lost, though Wendy thinks she might be for a time.
I was once on a forum of some sort , where a guy apologized for soliciting a spoiler, but had to ask about this movie because his wife just would not see a movie with animal characters if they die or the overall story has an unhappy outcome for them. So since then I have made a point of disclosing those facts about this movie, spoiler aversion be damned.
James, what was the recent case of some kind of prestige big-deal project that was suspended, and maybe finally cancelled, for charges of horse maltreatment?
“James, what was…”
Hellafino. Maybe Google does.
I thought you were commenting on the name Lucy vs Luuceee ‘-)
“A Dog’s Purpose’ (which book I was gifted, but never read) had charges leveled at it, as well as . . .
https://www.wkbw.com/news/national/10-popular-movies-that-faced-claims-of-animal-abuse
Also worth mentioning (though I suppose not for those who never go to any movies) is the wonderful performance by Michelle Williams as Wendy. This was fairly early in her post-television career, and really showed what she could do emotionally. The director, Kelly Reichardt, has subsequently used her a couple more times.