> You'll notice I added four "food" emojis: the crab, shrimp, squid, and lobster. I have no idea why they were assigned "food-marine" instead of "animal-marine". They look happy, healthy, and uncooked.
On Apple platforms, at least, all the crustaceans mentioned are red and therefore look very much cooked.
He's lucky to be able to do it more than once. A friend's cousin got acute reaction from pathogens in raw fish which got him to ICU and now the doctor said he should avoid eating even cooked fish because he could do an allergic reaction.
I just want to say, I love emojis. I wish there were thousands more. I love the artistry, the stylistic differences between platforms. I love the way their meaning changes with the times. I love it all.
What annoys me is that they are unbounded. You can always add more. A script has a finite set of symbols and its relatively rare that its extended with a new symbol. It's just a job retention measure for the Unicode consortium.
They have also become an online lingua franca. You'll see this a lot on TikTok, which autotranslates captions, descriptions, and even static or dynamic text within the videos. Emojis allow users viewing these autotranslated posts to communicate to the poster in a comprehensible manner (even if that's just "this is funny" or "I love this")
Hieroglyphics were (mostly) phonetic. You can do a 1:1 mapping of hieroglyphics to Ancient Greek (with a few exceptions) - Carl Sagan Videos: Cosmic Rosetta Stone - https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xeryd2
It’s both. Each emoji has a pictographic meaning as defined by Unicode, but there’s also a language that has arisen contextually on social media. For example the “painting nails” emoji may refer to painting one’s nails, but it can also mean “whatever” as in “whatever you say I’m just painting my nails”.
Or the skull emoji which has a variety of meanings relating to being metaphorically dead - “I’m dying from laughing”, “you’re fucked”, etc.
There’s also the controversy over the acceptability or not of using the sobbing emoji to represent laughter.
2) Evolution is a biological process term, and an overloaded and ambiguous one at that. Culture is accretive and driven by social dynamics. “Cultural evolution” is literally nonsensical. This was, however, a popular way of thinking in the nineteenth century; make of that what you will.
> Evolution is a biological process term, and an overloaded and ambiguous one at that. Culture is accretive and driven by social dynamics. “Cultural evolution” is literally nonsensical. This was, however, a popular way of thinking in the nineteenth century; make of that what you will.
I think you might be confusing the modern understanding of cultural evolution with the 19th century (to put it plainly: racist) idea of social Darwinism. Cultural evolution is a much more recent concept that makes an analogy between the modern understanding of the transmission of genes and the transmission of ideas. The analogy is of course imperfect, but by no means "literally nonsensical". See here for a very comprehensive discussion: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evolution-cultural/
OP made a specific claim - words represent an evolutionary progression from hieroglyphs, are therefore better, and we should go forward and not back.
I see nothing in cultural memetic theorizing (which I summarized as “culture is accretive and driven by social dynamics”) that supports that.
The term “cultural evolution” is highly unfortunate as it is one more example of humanities folk borrowing science terminology in a bid to coin some evocative word salad that will sound relevant and scientific.
> 2) Evolution is a biological process term, and an overloaded and ambiguous one at that. Culture is accretive and driven by social dynamics. “Cultural evolution” is literally nonsensical. This was, however, a popular way of thinking in the nineteenth century; make of that what you will.
Calling things racist isn't a valid argument. Meme theory is from the 20th century, not the 19th.
It is not a regression. It is a way of encoding the incredibly nuanced human communication into dry text.
We communicate with much more than language (autistic persons excluded, as they can be blind to social cues) and many messages are open to multiple interpretations. Emojis help frame the context, which would otherwise be framed by inflexion, tone, subtle movements of tens facial muscles.
> Pictographs can convey way more meaning than text. Add in cultural competency (subtext etc.) and it becomes incredibly potent. Hence, memes.
Citation needed. I think you might prove that by expressing those three sentences in pictograms, so that we can verify whether they convey "way more meaning". I have my doubts.
Craziest thing IMO: It doesn't leave its larval stage, but you can give it the hormones that turn other reptilians into adults - and they work! You'll get a living adult axolotl, a pretty normal looking reptile with just a few minor bugs (IIRC).
My strongly held opinion is that dragons are dinosaurs and like dinosaurs and birds are in the group Archosauria so I'd be inclined to lump dragons in with birds. This explains why you never see dragons because you never see dragons for the same reason you never see dinosaurs.
I suspect many people coming here from companies with Slack will be proud to be celebrating the singular amphibian that's anthropomorphized as the unmistakable Bufo emoji collection.
It’s a common misconception that dragons are reptiles. The are actually mammals. For some reason, historical depictions of dragons depict them with scales—this is inaccurate, real dragons have fur, give live birth, and even produce milk. I think the misconception of dragons as reptilian has an origin in early European depictions of dragons. Dragons are not native to most parts of Europe so we can assume that the artists never saw a real dragon. You can see similar inaccuracies in depictions of other animals, like lions, leopards, beavers, and elephants.
You’d think the Unicode consortium would know better. Dinosaurs are also miscategorized as reptilian but I can understand the mistake, because dinosaurs are extinct.
Our dragons are all reptiles around here. I had to slay four of them last fall before they set up dens in the yard. It was miserable work, but I'm a good candidate for canonization now, which is more than I can say for most weekend projects.
The world "dragon", i.e. Greek "drakon", originally meant just "big snake" and this is its meaning in the stories from the Greek/Roman antiquity or in the Bible translations.
Much later, during the Middle Ages, "dragon" began to be used for translating the names of many kinds of animals, usually of the winged type, from the mythologies of various countries.
In order to identify the many kinds of "dragon" animals, in each case one would have to trace the origin of the story, which was the original language of the story, which was the original word that has been translated as "dragon", and which was the description of that animal, e.g. with or without wings, with fur or with feathers or with scales, with or without feet and so on.
Ah, I see. Probably, "dragon" is a misspelled contraction of "Dr. Racoon," which fits both your description and the records of their medical properties.
Regarding the suggested categorization: Why is a dragon considered “grounded”? Why is a scorpion considered more “squishable” (good luck!), than a lizard?
Good points. I thought about making an airborne category, but there were too many flightless birds. I also thought about removing the dragon and unicorn since they're imaginary.
I just imagine that the dragon is too overweight to fly, and that scorpions are easy to squish if you have sturdy construction boots.
I love this categorization. I do have one recommendation. Please move penguins from birdy to aquatic. As the seminal paper on fungi and bird fishiness demonstrates, penguins are very fishy birds [0].
strangely there is no “eating” emoji, depicting a person actively consuming a food or beverage. Why is this, when it is perhaps one of the few nearly universal human behaviors
To be pedantic (which could be a slogan of this website) then depending on how you define eating, there will be a small number of people who don’t ‘eat’ food (I.e. consume via mouth), but must have it inserted directly into their stomach.
On Apple platforms, at least, all the crustaceans mentioned are red and therefore look very much cooked.