Why You Owe Your Life to Bugs & The Fascinating Rise of the Emoji

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Today, on something you should know, some common words people often use incorrectly.

Then, the amazing world of bugs.

Without bugs, life would be very different.

So, there's the squash bee, which is the only bee that pollinates squash.

So, without those squash bees, we wouldn't have any versions of squash.

And without a fly called the chocolate midge, we would not have chocolate.

Also, how to make healthy foods even healthier.

And you know those little emoji icons you use in texts?

There's much more to the emoji story than you ever knew.

It's almost not so much about how emoji are used as how they're built.

The fact that they're voted on by this committee of software engineers who have to argue about how many beans is the bean emoji going to show, what type of bean is the bean emoji going to show.

All this today on something you should know.

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something you should know fascinating intel the world's top experts and practical advice you can use in your life today

something you should know with mike carruthers

you know my mother told me never to correct other people's grammar when it's incorrect so I seldom if ever do.

But I do notice when people make grammar mistakes because I just I happen to really like language.

And so here are some common grammar mistakes.

Not that I'm saying you make them, but they are common grammar mistakes that are worth paying attention to.

First of all, bring versus take.

Bring and take both describe transporting something or someone from one place to another, but the correct usage depends on the speaker's point of view.

Somebody brings something to you, but you take it somewhere else.

Bring me the mail and then take your shoes to your room.

Just remember, if the movement is toward you, you use bring and if the movement is away from you, you use take.

Ironic versus coincidental.

A lot of people get this wrong.

If you break your leg the day before a ski trip, that's not ironic.

It's coincidental.

If you drive up to the mountains to ski and there was more snow back at your house than there is in the mountains, that's ironic.

Imply versus infer.

To imply means to suggest something without saying it outright.

To infer means to draw a conclusion from what someone else implies.

As a general rule, the speaker or writer implies and the listener or reader infers.

Farther versus further.

Farther refers to physical distance while further describes the degree or extent of an action or situation.

I can't run any farther is correct, but I have nothing further to say.

If you can substitute the word more or additional, then use further.

Fewer versus less.

Use fewer when you're referring to separate items that can be counted.

Use less when referring to the whole.

So you have fewer dollars, but less money.

And that is something you should know.

So here's an interesting statistic.

For every human being on the planet, there are 1.4 billion insects.

That's a lot of bugs.

And while many of us are creeped out and grossed out by bugs, you wouldn't be here if they weren't here.

And even if some bugs do creep you out, there are probably other bugs that don't.

Butterflies, ladybugs.

They're bugs, but they seem to lack the yuck factor.

Cockroaches, on the other hand, seem to send people running.

So why is that?

Now sure, some bugs are dangerous, but in many ways, they do more good than harm, as you're about to hear, from from Karen Light Gibson.

She is an educator.

I think you can call her a bug enthusiast.

And she's author of a book called Bug Life, How Bees, Butterflies, and Other Insects Rule the World.

Hi, Karen.

Welcome to Something You Should Know.

Hi, thanks for having me.

So bugs, to many of us, bugs are pests.

Right?

They're annoying, they get in your house, they ruin your picnic.

So

how do we look at this differently?

Without insects, we would not live very long.

There is a famous ecologist who says that without insects, we probably wouldn't survive more than six months.

And the reason for that is they are the base of the food chain.

So every animal that we rely on relies on them in some way or another.

About 75% of the food that we eat is pollinated exclusively by pollinators.

And also

without insects or other invertebrates, we would be completely covered in trash simply because they are our main decomposers who break down all of the dead things.

So without them, we would not have food and we would be covered in trash.

So we

rely on them pretty heavily.

Well, that's a really good response and a good reason not to loathe insects that the way many of us do.

But then again, you think, well, okay,

what about mosquitoes?

Couldn't we live without them?

I mean, from what I understand, mosquitoes are like the biggest killer in the world because of the disease they carry.

They kill people.

They kill animals.

Couldn't we live without mosquitoes?

Yeah, that is an insect that is often brought up in terms of, well, couldn't we do without it?

And there are some entomologists who believe that maybe we could live without them others argue that we couldn't simply because they are such a large food source for other insects but also for other animals bats rely pretty heavily on mosquitoes for food so i think that what a lot of entomologists are trying to do

are figure out ways to sterilize mosquitoes.

So what they do is they sterilize the males and then release huge numbers of them in order to make it so they can't actually mate.

So it's kind of a debate amongst entomologists whether or not we could live without mosquitoes.

But we do know that they are an important food source and they are working on ways to reduce numbers.

So in your view, As somebody who really is into this, what's the coolest bug and why?

Ooh, I would have to say my favorite insect is the dragonfly for a variety of reasons.

They're one insect that has an interesting life where as babies and teenagers, they live in the water and as adults, they live on land.

So they are important for aquatic ecosystems as well as terrestrial ecosystems.

They are also a really important bioindicator, meaning that their presence in water indicates healthy water.

And they are phenomenal hunters.

They're actually the best hunters in the world in terms of accuracy.

So they get their prey about 96% of the time, which is higher than almost any other animal on earth.

So they're pretty cool.

They're also just gorgeous, which I think helps.

That's really amazing.

I never knew that.

And I want to ask you, when you say they, they live when they're young, they live in the water.

What do you mean in the water?

I mean, I see them skimming over water, but you mean like a fish, they're in the water?

Yes.

Dragonflies lay their eggs in the water.

The eggs then hatch, and they are pretty vicious predators in water.

They like to hang out on the bottom.

They will eat other insects or invertebrates that are in the water, but then they will also eat things like fish or like small fish, obviously, or other types of aquatic animals tadpoles things like that they then crawl out of the water they stay close to the water obviously but they crawl onto a rock or a plant

they

break out of their shell as fully formed adults and then fly away They often stay close to water as adults because as I mentioned, they have to lay their eggs there, but the first half of their life is spent in the water as an aquatic predator.

Well, I'm sure there's a million different ways to categorize bugs, insects, but two interesting categories from my perspective is the ones that everybody hates, like cockroaches and mosquitoes.

And then there's the bugs.

They're still bugs, but people like them.

Butterflies and dragonflies, they're beautiful.

So when we think of animals that people really like, like elephants or giraffes, we call that charismatic megafauna.

Megafauna meaning very large animals.

There are a couple of entomologists who have coined the term charismatic minifauna, and butterflies and bees

are often the animals that fit that category of charismatic minifauna.

And those are the insects that tend to be more liked than others.

So a common, especially in the summertime, you know, a common pest that people deal with is is house flies.

And you wonder, how did that, how did that fly get in here?

I don't know how it got in.

Do you know how it got in here?

Well, there are lots of ways that they get in.

The other day, I was, I picked up an insect that was in the house, an earwig.

And as I was setting the earwig outside, a fly flew in the front door and I was like, ah, I knew it.

So sometimes they just pop in when we're least expecting them.

We also, insects are small and are able to fit through surprisingly tiny cracks.

So say you have a window that doesn't really look like to you that anything can get through the bottom.

Insects will often find a way to get in.

They may also come in on things like flowers or food.

Good news about houseflies.

is

they

often don't congregate, right?

You don't see huge numbers of them.

They are definitely annoying, but the chances of them causing any harm are very low.

The chances of them causing annoyance are very high.

Our topic is bugs, and I'm speaking with Karen Light Gibson.

She's author of Bug Life, How Bees, Butterflies, and Other Insects Rule the World.

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So, Karen, talk about ladybugs, because I see ladybugs.

I never see a group of them.

I only see them alone, and I only see them infrequently.

And I wonder, well, where are they the rest of the time?

And how are they mating if they're always alone?

And I don't know really much about them.

So ladybugs are another one of those charismatic minifauna species.

Most people like ladybugs, which is great because they actually can be pretty important for pest control and gardens.

They will congregate in large numbers as the temperature goes down.

Every once in a while, people will see, they like to come indoors because it's cold.

So some people will see huge numbers of them inside a windowpane.

In terms of mating, there's so much of the insect world we don't see

because it's tiny and it happens quickly.

Mating in most insects happens very fast and they are able to, depending on the species, lay eggs after they have mated a single time.

So sometimes they'll mate once and then that's all they need to lay hundreds of eggs throughout the rest of the season.

You will often see them on the underside of plants, so the underside of leaves.

especially plants that have lots of aphids.

So their larvae you probably see almost as frequently as you see adults, but you may not recognize them.

They look very different from adults.

The reason you don't see them a lot is because they're pretty secretive, as most insects are.

They're often on the underside of plants, and their larvae are completely unrecognizable from the adults.

So grasshoppers and crickets, I assume they're related.

And when I watch them, you know, when you get close to one, it jumps.

And I get the sense almost that they don't even know where they're going, that they just, they jump out of panic and they land wherever they land.

But that can't be true.

They must have some idea what they're doing.

They're not just jumping out of fear and hopes that they land in a safe place.

With grasshoppers, you're right.

Similar to butterflies, the movement can be fairly erratic so as to be confusing to predators predators like birds, right?

Because if birds don't know where they're going, there's less of a chance they're going to get eaten.

So when they actually jump, they may not know exactly where they're going, but a lot of insects are able to know directions based on

some insects use the Milky Way to determine where they're going.

And so when they jump, Is it just the power of their legs that allows them to jump so high?

Or is there some flying going on in there?

With a lot of grasshoppers, more so grasshoppers than crickets, they have extremely powerful muscles in their legs that allow them to jump very far.

But then you're right.

A lot of times you'll see the wings of a grasshopper open as they jump.

So not only are their legs super powerful, but then they're able to kind of glide from there with their wings.

Crickets you don't see use their wings as much.

There are actually a lot of insects that have wings that don't fly particularly well, but it may help them a little bit,

you know, further than their jump would on its own.

And so that sound that you hear on a summer night of crickets.

Yes.

I've always been told that's like a mating call.

Is that true?

Oh, yes.

That is their love language.

What's really interesting though is each species of cricket has a completely different sound.

So

there are, you know, 900 species or whatever in the US,

and they all have a different call.

I didn't know that.

And they all sound the same to me, but, you know, I know.

But it's the same with Katy dids, and it's the same with a lot of animals who use calls or light flashes or anything like that for mating.

It's very species-specific.

And is it the males doing the calling or do they call each other?

Well, so for calls, it's most often the males doing the calling.

For things like fireflies,

there are specific flash patterns that males use, but females also respond using particular flash patterns for that species.

So it kind of depends on the type of insect you're talking about.

But when we hear lots of

yelling in the trees from things like cicadas and katy dids or that cricket you just can't seem to find, it's most likely going to be a male making those noises.

Bees are one of those bugs people tend to like somewhat.

You know, they make honey and so we like them, but I hear that they're in trouble.

So what's the trouble?

So colony collapse was something that was brought to public attention

10 to 15 years ago now.

There's a specific mite that lives in honey beehives that causes lots of damage.

It's one aspect of what's causing this colony collapse.

The thing that most people don't know or don't talk about, including myself up until about five years ago, is the species that are actually in the most dire need of saving are our native bees.

So honeybees are not native to the United States.

They are originally from Europe and they were brought over here by settlers to pollinate food.

However, we have hundreds and hundreds of native bee species that are also pollinators.

They

are dwindling in population because of lots of human factors, things like pesticide use, habitat loss,

but they also compete with honeybees for food.

So not only are these honeybees that we know and love

experiencing issues with colony collapse, they're also out-competing our native bees, who are also pollinators of all of our native plants and native foods.

The bugs that pollinate, like houseflies pollinate, right?

I mean, there are a lot of bugs that pollinate, yes?

True, yes.

But somehow we think of bees as the ones that are pollinating.

Yeah, so bees are the top pollinators, which is, I think, why they get so much attention.

They are the main pollinators of a lot of our foods.

So there's the squash bee, which is the only bee that pollinates squash.

So without those squash bees, we wouldn't have any versions of squash.

So I think that since they pollinate the most,

they get the most attention.

However, flies are the second most important pollinator on the planet.

So everyone loves, not everyone loves chocolate, but chocolate is fairly beloved by most people in the world.

And without a fly called the chocolate midge, we would not have chocolate.

They are the only pollinator of the cacao plant or the cacao tree.

So without this tiny fly, we would not have chocolate.

And there are many species of wasps called fig wasps.

Without them, we would not have figs.

They're the only known pollinator of figs.

Fireflies, lightning bugs,

that thing that lights up, is that a mating thing or is that, does that do something else?

That is a mating thing.

Each species has a unique pattern that they flash.

And the males are normally the ones you see flying around.

The females tend to hang out on a piece of grass and they'll respond with flashes of their own, but the males are the ones who are actively searching and that flashing is all to find a mate.

So what the heck is a bed bug?

I

find bedbugs to be fascinating.

I also agree that they're horrible.

They're bugs that are related to cicadas.

They're in the same family as like cicadas and shield bugs.

So they have a stabbing mouth part

and they have perfected their existence.

They've also evolved to have an extremely flat body so they can fit into the tiniest cracks.

And they are also extremely resistant to pesticides.

And the big thing is, they like to feed on human blood.

They don't necessarily only live on beds.

They live in any space where humans hang out.

So people will oftentimes find them in their couch.

or any seat, especially a fabric seat.

So anything with fabric and tiny seams, they like to hide in.

One bug that people seem to universally hate is the cockroach.

And yet I hear that their reputation isn't completely deserved, that they're not all bad.

The majority of cockroach species are not actually pests.

So there's thousands of cockroach species and about eight of them are known to be pests to humans.

I love the American cockroach.

I think they're wonderful.

The first time I saw one, I almost dropped my cup of coffee that I was drinking because it was the biggest thing I've ever seen in my life.

But they are a species that live in sewers that will, every once in a while, be found in a home.

They're trying to get out of it, but they are super important decomposers.

They will eat.

They're one of the ones where without them, we would be covered in garbage.

So they are important, but those species that set up in homes are very, very difficult to get rid of and kind of can be the bane of existence for quite a few people and business owners.

What's a silverfish?

You know, I see them from time to time crawling out of somewhere, but I don't know anything about them or what they do or anything.

They love humidity.

They also love decomposing stuff.

So they will eat things like hair or mold or anything like that.

Silverfish are

very interesting in that they're one of the oldest insects that we have fossils of.

So they've been around for 400 million years and they look very similar to how they did 400 million years ago.

They evolved before most wings had in or most insects had wings.

So they

kind of just hang out mostly in humid rooms like bathrooms and just eat stuff that's decaying.

They don't spread disease.

They're harmless, relatively harmless.

Yes, but they are surprising to see

if one should pop out while you're in the shower.

So we have to live with bugs.

I mean, there's certainly a lot of them.

So we might as well get to know a little bit about them.

And I appreciate you sharing this.

Karen Light Gibson has been my guest.

The name of her book is Bug Life, How Bees, Butterflies, and Other Insects Rule the World.

And there's a link to that book in the show notes.

Karen, thank you for being here and talking about this.

Yeah, thank you so much for talking to me.

This was really fun.

You bet.

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What do you know about the emoji?

That curious little icon that so many of us put in texts or in posts.

Some people say that emojis help to telegraph the tone of your written words so people can tell if you're being serious or trying to be funny or sarcastic.

And there are so many different emoji icons.

I mean, just if you just look on your phone, there are hundreds of them.

Where do they come from?

What do people really think when they see an emoji in your text?

Do they help?

Here with some answers is Keith Houston.

He is author of a book called Face with Tears of Joy, a natural history of emoji.

Hi, Keith.

Welcome.

Thank you.

Thank you for having me.

So when did the first emoji show up?

It kind of depends on what you call an emoji.

So if you think it's a smiley face, then there are little smiley faces on prehistoric pots.

Or if you think it's a pointing hand, then lots of medieval manuscripts have got little pointing hands called manicules drawn in the margins, which were there to point out interesting bits of text.

If it's a yellow smiling face, then the first recognizable one comes out of the early 1960s.

It was designed by an American graphic artist called Harvey Ball.

And then finally, what most people might think of as an emoji is a little colorful icon they can use on their phone.

And you can trace their lineage pretty much directly back to Japan.

So when I think of the word emoji, I mean, immediately what comes to mind is the yellow face,

that looks like a sun with a face on it.

But I didn't know that it went back that far.

I think there are two ways to think about it.

One is that humans respond very strongly to pictures of human faces.

So I don't think it's surprising that we've been drawing human faces in different contexts for a long time.

But then if you think about where emoji came from in Japan, I think there's a feeling that Japanese culture is somehow quite visual.

And Japanese scripts have got a lot to do with that,

particularly kanji, which is the main Japanese script.

So that in writing a particular word, you're sometimes drawing the thing that you're referring to.

There's another particular thing in Japan that's often cited in the context of emoji, which was the Olympics came to Tokyo in the 1960s, and it was the first Olympics in the modern era that used pictographic wayfinding signs as opposed to just words.

So, rather than words saying swimming in whichever language, via picture of a swimmer.

And this is often held up as an example of kind of Japanese visual culture, graphic design.

And when you factor in the prevalence of manga and anime, so comics and animated movies and TV programs and so on, I think this is often used to justify or to explain the fact that emoji as a concept, as a modern concept, arose in Japan.

The word emoji started when and where did it come from?

So that's Japanese as well.

So it's actually two words.

It's e or e for picture and emoji for character.

So literally picture character.

Because now you hear the word, what is it, emoticon?

That like it's almost sounds like it comes from emoji, but it's talking about emotion, not what you just said.

Yeah, that's right.

So emoticons are kind of a case of parallel evolution, I think.

So emoji is in little graphical symbols, little standalone graphical symbols.

And that was late 70s, early 80s.

But then there was a guy called Scott Falman who worked at a university in the US.

He was a computer scientist.

And

he was part of this discussion thread where someone had made a joke and it wasn't, it didn't travel.

Jokes often don't travel in text or online media.

And so he made a proposal, I think tongue in cheek, to say we should use icons to delineate or to denote jokes, you know, or sort of happy or sad statements.

And he proposed using a colon, a dash, and a closing parenthesis to mean a happy face, and the same with an opening parenthesis to mean a sad face.

This was the emoticon.

I don't think he called them emoticons, but emoticon typically refers to one of these little faces constructed using textual characters rather than actually being a native emoji.

So they are kind of two different things.

So, in modern written communication like texts or posts on social media, I've heard it said that people use emojis to clarify their intent or their tone or their state of mind, that you know, a smiling face lightens things up that that that that's their purpose is that their purpose i've heard that sort of thing as well i think i guess in order for an emoji to be popular in general it had to first be popular in japan and i've heard it said that japanese written communication was sometimes quite formal or is sometimes quite formal and that emoji kind of punctured that a little bit.

They, you know, they brought a little bit of

joy or sadness or emotion to an otherwise relatively formal type of written communication.

And I'm sure the same thing is true for us and

for people who don't speak or read Japanese as well.

There's definitely a feeling of it brings literal and metaphorical color.

You have emoji being used as slang or as codes, as metaphors, punctuation even.

So there's definitely...

There's definitely something there.

They do do something to a written language.

But when you think about it, you could use an emoji in the same way that you use language in kind of a sarcastic way or an ironic way

where you actually confuse the message rather than clarify.

There was a survey that Adobe did, the software company, that found that something like half of all people who use emoji use them contrary to their face values.

So if you imagine looking at an emoji and thinking, okay, well, it's a happy face.

This probably communicates joy or happiness or something positive.

Half the people that are are using that are using it perhaps in an ironic sense you know so glad you got fired today happy face or whatever it happens to be so emoji become part of language become subject to the same the same uh rules or the same uh sort of figures of speech we can use like irony and sarcasm and metaphor so

it's quite funny.

It's actually quite easy, I think, to use an emoji in a way which is perhaps not quite what the recipient or how they interpret it may differ from your intention.

In fact, I think there's a couple of nice examples of that.

One

is that emoji can actually have different meanings in different countries as well.

So it's not to do with the language that the people speak.

It's just to do with their interpretation of that graphical icon.

So I've read that in China, if you use a smiling emoji with just standard kind of open eyes, so two little dots for eyes, and then a smile,

that can often be seen as a bit dismissive or insincere because it doesn't look really smiling.

So you need to use one of the smileys where the eyes are little sort of curves, the little half moons, as if you're kind of squinting with joy.

You know, you can really see the smile in the emoji's eyes.

And so that's a genuinely happy emoji.

So if I sent a text message with just one of the conventional smiling emoji to a Chinese person, I might not be conveying sincerity.

I might not be conveying what I expect.

And so the second thing...

or the second example rather of how emoji can be a bit treacherous in terms of their meaning is you may not see the same emoji that I've sent to you.

So my phone presents a particular set of emoji to me that have been designed by the maker of my phone.

Let's say that's Google.

And the maker of your phone presents to you a different set of emoji, which have been created by the maker of your phone.

Let's say that's Apple.

And so for a long time, for example, Apple decided to make the gun, the pistol emoji look like a water pistol, like a water gun, to kind of make it less threatening.

Whereas Google still had a realistic looking gun.

So I could be very angry with you and send you a gun emoji and you see a water pistol.

So I'm sure the meaning that you derive from that, that you take away from that, is quite different depending on the actual emoji you see.

And it can be quite subtle.

It doesn't have to be something as blatant as that, but emoji do differ.

And

in the context of, for example, an emoji in the courts, which is a topic that comes up

more and more regularly, I've seen it suggested that when a jury is being shown messages, they have to be shown both the original message as it was sent, as it was seen on screen by the sender, and as it was seen on screen by the recipient, because the emoji can change enough to change the interpretation of that message.

So

just picking a particular emoji that seems on the face of it to convey what you want to convey, it can be derailed by any number of different factors.

That's really important and something I bet most people don't know.

If I send you a message and attach an emoji to that message, I'm assuming you're seeing what I send.

And in some cases, you are.

If we're using the same chat app, for example, we're probably fine.

But if I'm sending you an SMS message, that doesn't travel through this kind of closed end-to-end communication channel.

It goes out over a standard protocol, comes into your phone, and a completely different app may show it to you, a completely different manufacturer may be showing it to you.

And in fact, interestingly, Twitter, or rather X, having gone with the water pistol orthodoxy for a long time, has now gone back to a more conventional gun.

There are fairly big differences in big platforms out there that can really mess with the meaning of the emoji that you're sending.

So given all the variables that you've just laid out, an emoji in a message could actually muddle things up as much as it might clear things up.

I think that's exactly it.

Even just slang.

So I'm of a generation where a thumbs up emoji is like a positive, yes, I received your message.

I agree.

But for younger people than me, a thumbs up could be seen as almost dismissive or really a really weak acknowledgement like, yeah, sure, okay.

Like you couldn't be bothered sending anything with a a bit more oomph, a bit more emotion behind it.

Um, the skull emoji, apparently, a lot of younger people use it to mean I've just died laughing.

So, it's a, it's a, it's not, it's an alternative to the, you know, the cry laughing face or one of the laughing faces.

So, these things can mean, they can have quite different meanings based on your geographical location, the device you're looking at or texting on, um, the age or the background of the person that you're talking to, even just the context.

It's emoji is language, and it can be as precise or imprecise as language.

I'm not one to use emoji a lot.

I don't put them in texts all that often.

I don't know.

I just don't think that way.

I guess I like to have it that my words are expressing what I mean, so I don't need an emoji to support my meaning.

I don't use them that much.

I would tend to agree.

It's interesting.

Despite having written a book on emoji, I think I use them a little bit more now, but I'm not using them to communicate the main intent of a message.

It's often to add something, as you suggested, but I quite often used to use them as literal illustrations, which I think is perhaps the most boring possible use of an emoji.

But

if I've got a shopping list on my phone, I'll put a picture of the thing that I need to buy, a little emoji of it beside it.

And it just brings a tiny little bit of joy, a little freesome looking at it.

So I'm not always using them when I'm communicating with other people.

I do notice that some of my colleagues at work do, especially in instant messaging, it's rare that someone is writing them in an email, I think.

And it's obviously, they're pretty much excluded, I think, from sort of formal writing of most kinds.

Well, clearly people use them a lot.

I mean, if I push the button on my phone that pulls up all the symbols, all the emoji symbols, I mean, there's zillions of them.

And I don't think that phone manufacturers would include them in the phone if people didn't want them and if they weren't popular.

They definitely are.

I think it's actually quite interesting how they came about.

So when they developed in Japan, each of these different mobile operators had their own vocabulary.

And so they had to figure out how to convert.

So when your phone received an emoji, it had to try and interpret it.

Is it the same as one that I have?

Is it one that I don't have?

And then the same when I'm sending a message back, that the phones had to kind of negotiate what different emojis they could send and what they meant.

And then Google and Apple arrived in Asia.

They wanted to expand.

So Apple was launching the iPhone, Google was launching Gmail.

And they both separately realized that emoji were quite important and so they added emoji support to gmail to the iphone google then went to this organization called unicode which is basically a bunch of software engineers who meet up in california every now and again to discuss how text should be represented on computers and they said can you help us standardize this and unicode said yes and so emoji kind of at a stroke became available for all of these different computer companies to start adding to their devices.

And it just snowballed from there.

So I think the first release of the Unicode standard that had emoji in it was in 2010.

And there were about 700.

And then they added a few extra ones from Japan.

And that was the first set of emoji.

And since then, I think there are now close to 4,000 different emoji, depending on how you...

how you count.

It's quite difficult to count because you can change skin tones, you can change hair color and type in some cases.

You can even change the direction that some emoji face.

but there are now thousands to choose from.

Listening to you talk, it seems like

the correct plural of the singular emoji is emoji.

Is that correct?

That is the Japanese plural for it.

Although, now recently, I think I've seen it argued that effectively emoji is now an English word, and emojis is probably an acceptable plural.

So I think you can go either way.

Well, it seems weird to say emoji as the plural of emoji.

But then then again, we did a segment not long ago about Lego, and I got emails from listeners scolding me that the plural of Lego is Lego and not Lego.

So I stand corrected.

So do emojis come and go?

Like, do they fall out of favor, become less popular, new ones show up or what?

At the very top, it seems to be quite constant.

So Face with Tears of Joy has been the most popular emoji for, I think, a decade or more at this point.

And others kind of rotate around it.

So I think the red heart is, I think, number two.

And I think it's pretty much been quite, it's been pretty much the same again.

Further down, it does drop off quite quickly.

A lot of the emoji are just really, really not well used at all, which is one of the reasons why Unicode has decided to slow down.

the rate at which we add new emoji.

In particular, they're looking at some categories like flags and saying, there's almost no point.

Flags are used so rarely.

that they can't take them out of the standard.

Once a character is in the Unicode standard, there's no formal way to get rid of it.

So all of these emoji will be there forever, I should say.

Since you look deeply into this, what else about emoji that people may not realize or know about how they're used or whatever?

Something that I haven't heard before.

It's almost not so much about how emoji are used as how they're built.

The fact that they're voted on by this committee of software engineers who have to argue about how many beans is the bean emoji going to show, what type of bean is the bean emoji going to show.

They had a big argument in, I think it was, was it 2016, 2017, that was called Emoji Geddin in the press, where some of the members of this committee were getting quite hacked off that the consortium that owns emoji was spending so much time on them rather than trying to standardize all of the other characters, all of the other written scripts on Earth, which is kind of their main job.

And someone had proposed a frowning poop emoji to go with the smiling poop emoji, and just the rage or the incredulity that this raised from some of the people who had to vote on this was quite a thing to see.

I find that really interesting.

I find the fact that we, the people who use them, don't really have any control over them.

It's this random bunch of people seconded by big companies like Google and Meta

who have the control over them.

And yet, again, another surprising thing is they seem to work really well together in this particular committee.

So it's like it shouldn't work, but somehow it does.

So that to me is a constant source of amazement.

Does anybody or any company lay claim to the library of emojis, emoji?

Does anybody own them?

Does anybody make money off of them?

Or are they purely in the public domain?

So Unicode say that you can't propose an emoji which is a logo or a brand or has any kind of intellectual property associated with it.

So in terms of the things that you can type, I guess the way to think about an emoji is that it's a little textual symbol.

You can type in one application and send it to a different one and it'll still work.

It's like a letter.

You know, I can send the letter A from my texting application to yours and it might look different.

They might have different fonts, but we're both going to see an A.

I can send you a smiley emoji and they might look slightly different in the details, but we'll both see smiley emojis.

So that's what they are.

There will never be an emoji in that sense, which has any kind of ownership associated with it.

Also, there won't ever be any deities.

There will be no gods.

There will be no emoji gods.

What people have done to try and make money is they've made things which look a bit like emoji, but are not.

And they're typically called moji without the E.

And so the first big one was an application called Kimoji that Kim Kardashian launched.

And it was just a bunch of kind of stylized icons of her and her family that you could buy in an application.

And you could send them as pictures.

So you couldn't send them in-text.

You had to send them as what are called stickers in different applications.

And she made a lot of money out of this.

And as a result of that, there was this huge swell of Moji apps for kind of a few years where every celebrity,

anyone who was anyone really had their own Moji application.

And I think a fair amount of money was made.

And then they just kind of disappeared.

But the artwork of an emoji, I mean, somebody had to draw that or design that or paint that.

I mean, it had to come from somebody.

No, that's true.

So

companies like Google and Meta will pay people, will pay someone to draw their emoji to keep them all up to date.

Unicode has someone who does a kind of public domain representation.

So there's not, it's really interesting.

Unicode doesn't tell you what the letter A should look like.

It gives you an example of an A, and it says this should be an A, and it pretty much says, everyone knows what an A is.

So this is A.

This number,

this code inside your computer means A, and it's up to the computer to display the A.

And it's the same with emoji.

They'll give you an example of a smiling face, but that's not the smiling face which appears everywhere.

It's up to whoever is making an application or an operating system or a device to decide precisely what it's going to look at.

So that might mean changing the color.

It might mean changing the style.

So, you know, Apple Emoji looks slightly different to Google Emoji, which looks slightly different to Facebook emoji and so on.

So you're absolutely right.

Someone is being paid to draw these things.

But

I don't think there's like a hidden industry of people making money off of emoji, I'm afraid.

Well, the story of the emoji is a lot more in-depth than I realized.

And what you said about that the emoji that I send may not be the emoji you see, I'm going to remember that.

I've been speaking with Keith Houston.

He's author of the book Face with Tears of Joy, a natural history of emoji.

And there's a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes.

Keith, thank you for

joining us.

Not at all.

Thank you very much for having me.

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The next time you're in conversation about podcasts, and they seem to come up a lot in conversation these days, mention this one, tell people about something you should know, and help us spread the word.

I'm Mike Carruthers.

Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

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