[Music]
L: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s
enthusiastic about linguistics. I’m Lauren
Gawne.
G: And I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re
getting enthusiastic about emoji and gesture.
But first, my book about internet linguistics
is coming out in less than a week from when
this episode goes up.
L: Yay! It will be out July the 23rd, 2019.
It’s called Because Internet and it’s
available in all major booksellers – including
an audiobook which you read yourself, Gretchen.
G: Yes, I did. So, if you like hearing me
talk here, you can now listen to me read the
book. Or you can read the book in the conventional
way with the words in front of your eyes – is
also a thing you can do. I’m really excited
to get to share this book with you – to
finally get to hear what people think about
it. It is a really good thing to get it when
it first comes out, because if it has any
likelihood of hitting any sort of bestseller
list, pre-orders and sales in the first week
are what’s gonna make that happen. If you
can help us make more people pay attention
to the book by getting it on any sort of lists,
that would be super cool.
L: This episode is a bit of a taster for the
chapter on emoji that’s in the book.
G: Which you were kinda involved with, Lauren.
L: Which is why we’ve chosen this chapter.
But there are lots of other topics covered
in the book. I’ve been lucky enough to read
– you’ll hear how that went in the episode
– I’ve read this book. I’m very excited
for it. Other topics include things like how
we use punctuation to signal tone of voice,
the language of memes, and how the first social
network you joined influences your internet
life. That chapter I felt very seen.
G: I’ve had a lot of people contact me about
that chapter. Because Internet – there are
links in the description. There are links
on lingthusiasm.com. You can get it. You should
get it. I’m really excited to get to talk
about it more with people once they get to
read it.
L: In other exciting Lingthusiasm news, we’ve
added a new tier to our Patreon.
G: Several people have asked us, very nicely
of you, "Is there a way we can support the
podcast even more than the $5.00 a month for
the bonus episodes?" Now, there is. If you
sign up for the Ling-phabet tier – fancifully
named ling portmanteau names – for $15.00
a month, we will assign you your very own
symbol of the International Phonetic Alphabet
based on our super scientific personality
quiz. We had a lot of fun coming up with this
quiz. Then we will add your name or name of
choice and symbol to our Lingthusiasm Supporter
Wall of Fame on the website where it will
live as long as you wanna stay at that tier.
L: We are also happy for you to nominate your
favourite character of the IPA. We’re happy
to put any name within reason. This also makes
a great gift for the lingthusiast in your
life.
G: Yes! We’re really excited to provide
a way for people who have a bit more money
at their disposal to help support the rest
of the episodes that remain free for anybody
to access. So, think of this as a way of becoming
a generous person to support the free episodes
which remain free. We really wanna keep them
accessible to everybody. Plus, in celebration
of both the new tier and the new book, anybody
who joins this new tier by August 15th, 2019,
will get a book plate – which is a little
sticker that you can put in the front of your
book for Because Internet – which is signed
by me with your name customised on it. We’ll
have a form you can fill out. You will get
a sticker in the mail that you can put on
your copy of Because Internet. The two things
go together. Or I guess you could put it on
your laptop or something if you wanted to.
L: You could just put it in another book and
be like, “Gretchen has signed this book
for me.” Stickers are a very flexible thing.
Having access to our bonus episodes means
that you will be able to access our latest
one, which is all about words that only your
family use.
G: We had a lot of fun talking about familects
and hearing about all of your familects in
the familect bonus episode. So, it’s a lot
of a fun. And, of course, if you join at the
higher tier, you still get access to the bonus
episodes. You don’t lose your access to
anything. It’s just an extra thing that
you can do if you wanna be super supportive.
L: We’ll also be recording an upcoming Patreon
bonus episode that takes you behind the scenes
on Because Internet.
G: You can read the book when it comes out
and then ask us your questions about internet
linguistics or what it’s like to write a
book. Tweet them to us @Lingthusiasm or email
us at contact@lingthusiasm.com. Both of those
are also on the website if you don’t have
a pen on you right now – also by August
15th. Same deadline for both. We will answer
them in an upcoming bonus episode. You get
to hear all about what it was like to write
a book about the fast-moving pace of the internet.
L: So much book excitement. So much Patreon
excitement. It’s all happening. I’m so
excited.
G: Everything is coming up internet.
[Music]
G: The reason we wanted to do a very special
Lingthusiasm gesture-slash-Because Internet
emoji episode is because this is the part
in Because Internet where Lauren actually
makes a cameo.
L: Yay!
G: The story goes I was working on the emoji
chapter, and I was kind of stuck, and I was
complaining about this to Lauren, and Lauren
very kindly said, “Well, why don’t you
send it to me, and I’ll read and see if
I have any comments?”
L: I was really just wanting to read it because
I was just really excited to see how the book’s
shaping up. It was entirely selfish.
G: Well, it seemed very altruistic of you.
I remember I had this list of gestures and
emoji. I had like “thumbs up” and “nodding”
and “winking” and “rolling eyes” and
“playing a tiny violin in false sympathy”
and “high five” and “giving the middle
finger” and “shrugging” and all of these
things.
L: I highlight this list and I’m like, “These
are all very nice examples, Gretchen, but
we have a name for these in the gesture literature.
We refer to these as 'emblematic gestures.'
We can talk about what they are." But I kinda
just made this passing comment and sent it
back to you.
G: You sent a bunch of other comments, and
they were nice, but this was the one that
really stuck with me because you were something
like, “You know we have a name for this
in the gesture literature, right?” And I
was like, “I didn’t know there was a name
for these.” I was just making a list of
gestures that came to mind because when I
was talking about emoji, I like gesture as
an analogy to what emoji are doing because
gestures and words work in concert with each
other. You don’t generally just do one or
the other. You often do both. I thought this
made a lot of sense in terms of how people
integrate emoji with the words that they’re
typing. But I was just making a list of gestures
that occurred to me. It turns out that what
I was also doing without realising it was
making a list of gestures that had common
names in English because that’s the kind
of gesture that’s easy to write down in
words.
L: There’s good reason that you did that,
because these types of gestures tend to be
useable with speech, but they can have a meaning
on their own. They’re very culturally specific.
For example, not everyone uses the “thumbs
up” to mean “good.”
G: Right. Because in some cultures it means
“Sit on this.” It’s like the middle
finger. It’s a sexual kind of insult.
L: Yeah.
G: Yeah. My list didn’t include stuff like
the gesture that you make if you’re trying
to give someone directions or if you’re
trying to say, “Here’s how I got from
my home to this café. I went down this street,
and then I went up that street, and then I
went over here.” Those kinds of gestures
that don’t have conventional names are harder
to describe on the page – harder to describe
in an audio podcast – but those are another
kind of gesture that I wasn’t really thinking
about at all.
L: We talk about those gestures that kind
of illustrate the speech that we make in our
gesture episode. That’s why we did the gesture
episode as a video.
G: Yeah. We did the gesture episode entirely
because you were like, “Oh, well, there’s
a name for this.” And I was like, “Yeah.
Oh, wait. Okay.” So, I’m sitting there,
kind of googling/Wikipedia-ing like, “What
is this?” I think you were asleep in Melbourne
at this point. I’m like, “Lauren, send
me all the things. I wanna know more about
gesture!”
L: If there’s one thing I like more than
talking to you about linguistics it’s the
chance to get to talk about gesture, which
is one of my all-time favourite subjects.
I think I sent you basically my entire undergrad
language and gesture course reading materials.
G: I definitely recall a syllabus – yeah.
You’ve taught courses about gesture, and
I was like, “Oh, my god. Send me all the
things!” So, you sent me – you know.
L: I sent you all the things. So much enthusiasm.
G: All the things. I started falling down
this gesture rabbit hole, which was really
cool to me because as a linguist I’m used
to being able to have a conversation with
someone and just kind of be sitting there
being like, “Yeah, well, what you’re saying
is fairly interesting, but what I’m actually
doing right now is analysing your vowels,”
which is a thing that we’ve all had happen
to us, have we not? But also, in this case,
I could be like, “Oh, well, I’m analysing
your vowels and I’m also analysing your
gesture.” I’m at a café trying to keep
working on the book, and I’m just looking
around at everybody and analysing all of their
gestures.
L: I always love this point when people start
studying gesture, and they’re like, “I
just can’t stop paying attention to how
people gesture.” And I’m like, “Yeah.
It’s pretty great.”
G: Study linguistics – we’ll render you
completely incapable of an ordinary conversation.
But, yeah, it was really exciting. That was
what kind of gave me – like, “Oh! We should
actually do a gesture episode.” And then,
Lauren, you were like, “But we have a podcast.
This is why I have not suggested that we do
a gesture episode.” So, we ended up doing
the video gesture episode because I got so
into gesture, and it was like, “We’re
gonna need to figure out how to do a video.”
The thing that made me really excited about
learning about gesture was that it actually
explains a lot about how we use emoji because
there’s a distinction in the gesture between
gestures that have conventional names and
gestures that don’t. We can see this kind
of pop up in emoji as well.
L: I think this is because emoji are really
– humans want to gesture. I mean, we all
gesture. People who have been blind since
birth will gesture even though they’ve never
seen other people do it. It’s a really strong
compulsion in human communication. I think
emoji are allowing us to kind of return having
a body to online communication. We always
think of typing in chat as really disembodied.
But having options like emoji allows us to
start expressing those things that we want
to express in conversation again.
G: A lot of times, when we think about having
a body online, we think about kind of a video
game character-picker body, where you get
the hair colour, and you get the clothes,
and you have the haircut, and the eye colour,
and these kinds of things, and what the figure
looks like. But in actual fact, what people
are doing with emoji is a lot more about what
you’re doing with your body rather than
necessarily having a character picker, like
an avatar, that kind of follows you around
and does all the stuff. You do that in video
games, but it’s less common for conversations.
So, it was that interesting, like, “What
role do gestures actually have in conversation?”
L: We have a few decades' worth of literature
of people trying to unpack this and come up
with descriptions of the different functions
that gesture have. We’ve returned to the
existing literature in this area that’s
been researching this problem for years and
looking at emoji in the context of that.
G: Yeah. It was really exciting to be like,
“Actually, we don’t have to reinvent the
wheel.” There’s this distinction that
seems to work pretty well that people may
have been subconsciously porting into emoji.
The thing that made me really excited about
– so the gestures that have names are called
“emblem gestures.” Emblem gestures are
things like “thumbs up,” “middle finger,”
“peace sign,” and things like that. Emblem
gestures have these really narrow constraints
for how you have to produce them in order
for it to be the right thing. My favourite
Canadian-Australian cross-cultural example
of this is like when I make the peace sign,
I can make the peace sign with my palm facing
out away from me or I can make it with the
palm facing towards me, and it’s the same
peace sign. It’s fine.
L: No, don’t do that! Don’t come to Australia
or New Zealand or the UK and do that.
G: Why not, Lauren?
L: Because that meaning is basically the same
for us as the middle finger is. It’s an
offensive gesture.
G: That’s like “up yours,” right?
L: Yeah.
G: One of my favourite stories about this
is apparently Winston Churchill, during WWII
– so during WWII, they had this “V for
victory” gesture, which basically looked
like the peace sign. But Winston Churchill
would often do it backwards. And there’s
historic records of people telling him, “Winston,
man, come on. You gotta stop flipping off
the Nazis.” And he’s like “No, no, no.
I’m gonna keep doing this.”
L: Well, no. Winston said, “Oh! Oh, golly.
Goodness me. I am a posh man. I didn’t know
that it had that meaning –"
G: And then he kept doing it though!
L: In public. Then, in private, he was like,
“Yeah, I totally knew it.”
G: So, gestures have really narrow standards
of form. You have to produce a peace sign
in the exact right way, or it might mean "eff
off". But these ones that have names and standards
of form, they also add an extra layer of meaning
to what you’re saying. If you say something
like “Good job!” with a thumbs up versus
“Good job!” with the middle finger or
“Good job!” with rolling eyes or a winking
or something like this, those all have –
L: They all mean very different things.
G: Some of those are sarcastic. Some of those
are an innuendo.
L: As you noticed in that list, there’s
a lot of – because emblematic gestures are
so good at conveying a lot of meaning in a
single visual form, a lot of them have been
made into emoji. But there are other emoji
that also have a similar property that aren’t
gestures physically.
G: Yeah. Exactly. Some of the emoji that became
popular in the early stages of emoji – things
like the eggplant and the peach and the smiling
pile of poo – also seem to act in a sort
of emblem sort of way. If you say, “Good
job!” and then the eggplant emoji or like,
“Good job!” and then the smiling pile
of poo...
L: Or "Good job!" and the flame – just to
give a nice positive spin.
G: Yeah. Or the flame to make it positive
– that adds this extra layer of meaning
to “Good job!” in the same way that adding
a thumbs up emoji or a middle finger emoji
adds this extra layer of meaning.
L: But I think, importantly, just in the same
way that gestures have clear cultural differences
between different languages or different communities,
those emblem uses of emoji also have really
specific communities of use.
G: Yeah. Exactly. Not everyone knows that
people use the eggplant as an innuendo. If
you don’t know that, then you might use
it in its literal sense and be like, “Oh,
I’m making eggplant parmesan. Here’s an
eggplant.”
L: No, Dad, don’t!
G: If you search for, I think it’s “eggplant
parmesan”/“eggplant emoji” on Twitter,
you see a lot of younger people complaining
about their parents.
L: But also you can’t use a corn or a cucumber
to have the same phallic meaning.
G: Yeah. Even though the shape is pretty much
the same. But they’re not substitutable
in the same sort of way, just like you can’t
do – the “peace sign” backwards and
the “peace sign” forwards are not the
same thing.
L: These emblematic ones – basically, because
you can name them, they’re easier to spot.
But there are other uses of emoji.
G: Yeah. One of the things that I liked about
this is that some of the emblems like the
dancing lady in the red dress, which is just
– officially, it’s just a dancer. For
a while, a bunch of the different platforms
had it encoded as different types of dancers.
Google had this yellow blob with a rose in
its mouth, and I think Microsoft had this
disco guy, and Apple had this lady in a red
dress. People got really confused when they
thought they were sending a lady in the red
dress and then their friend got the blob or
the disco guy because they had these narrow
ranges of meaning. Yet, yeah, these non-emblem-like
gestures – they have a lot more room for
variation, right?
L: Yep. For example, if I’m wishing you
“happy birthday” in a text message, I
might send a few emoji to illustrate that.
I might send a balloon and a birthday cake
and the little party popper, because it’s
very celebratory. But I could just as easily
send celebratory popper, birthday cake, champagne
bottle – because why not?
G: Or the wrapped gift or some of these other
ones. The birthday cakes, for example, they’re
also really different across different platforms.
They have different numbers of candles. Some
of them are chocolate. Some of them are vanilla.
Some of them are strawberry. They’re quite
different across different platforms. But
this doesn’t seem to bother people in the
same sort of way. Sending someone a birthday
cake emoji doesn’t really have any additional
meaning beyond just “This is a birthday
cake.” If you know what a birthday cake
is, you can interpret a birthday cake emoji.
It doesn’t have the additional meaning the
way the eggplant or the fire or the dancing
girl in the red dress has.
L: And you don’t have to send them in any
particular order. You don’t even have to
include those emoji. You could just send “Happy
Birthday!” like a boring monster.
G: I really over analyse my birthday messages
now because we’ve been doing so much analysis
of what people use for birthday emoji. But,
yeah, you can send a whole bunch of different
things and they’re all equally birthday-like,
which is not true of words. If I say “merry
birthday,” I am clearly making a joke.
L: Hmm. That is not the standard greeting.
G: Or if I say, “Birthday happy,” you’re
like, “Excuse me, what? Sorry?”
L: You’re not speaking English as she is
known.
G: Exactly. What I liked about this is that
these unnamed gestures – so the gestures
you use to be like, “Okay, here’s the
path that I took to get here,” or, “Here’s
the motion that it takes to catch a frisbee
or to throw a ball of this particular size
and weight” and something like this – those
gestures also have a large degree of latitude
for variation.
L: Yeah. We see a lot of variation in how
people use gestures. Whether it is present
or not is not necessarily – it’s not obligatory
in the same way that syntax is, for example.
G: Yeah. There’s all this variation, and
you don’t have as many of the communication
errors and problems when you’re doing these
kinds of gestures that just illustrate what’s
actually going on. If I send you “happy
birthday” and I put a birthday cake or I
put the gift or I put a balloon, that doesn’t
change the meaning the way sending you “happy
birthday” with thumbs up versus “happy
birthday [middle finger]" ... that really
changes the meaning there.
L: Thanks. Great.
G: “Happy birthday – you annoying person.”
“Happy birthday – I hate you.” Or like
“Happy birthday [rolled eyes]”? Like “Whoa!
Excuse me?” “Happy freaking birthday,
all right?” So, yeah, it was really exciting
to get to kind of realise that this distinction
between, okay, there are some emoji that seem
to cast a different light on the meanings
of the words that they’re associated with.
And there’s also some gestures that cast
a different light on the meanings of the words
they’re associated with. And there are some
emoji that don’t seem to change the meaning
of the words involved and also gestures that
don’t seem to change the meaning of the
words involved. They’re just kind of the
supplementary illustration. The fact that
these distinctions seem to exist for both
types was really fascinating to me. Then,
I had to be like, “Lauren, can I write you
into my book because I figured this out thanks
to you. I can’t take credit for inventing
this. Is it weird if I make you a character
in my book?”
L: I mean, it’s kind of delightful. It’s
kind of an interesting extension of our podcast
life. But the more I thought about this in
relation to the data that you already had
in the chapter, the more I was like, “Actually,
I think we need to do a really systematic
analysis of the parallels between gesture
and speech, and emoji and written language.”
I was like, “Well, how about we actually
write an academic paper together that really
drills down into the literature on gesture
to see just how far we can take this?”
G: This actually solved a problem for me too
because, I mean, I love a good taxonomy.
L: Who doesn’t?
G: Who doesn’t love a good taxonomy? Here’s
a way of carving up the world into different
pieces that illuminate some of the differences
between different situations. It’s fascinating.
But the other thing about a taxonomy is that
it does give names to a whole bunch of different
areas. This book is a pop linguistics book.
It is a fun book. Like, fun is in the definition.
It needs to be fun to read. The problem with
saying, “Okay, here’s this academic taxonomy
where we have six different names for different
categories of gestures” – I was restricting
myself deliberately to one or two new words
per chapter because that’s about as much
as a person can handle.
L: And I was like, “No, all the terminology.”
G: “We need all the terminology!” And
I was like, “Well, this is great. I agree
with this terminology. But I just can’t
use it all in a book that’s aimed at the
general public because most people do not
have your decade-plus of experience in gesture
studies, Lauren. I really hate to break it
to you.”
L: One day.
G: Writing an academic article meant that
I could say, “Okay, here’s the kind of
basic distinction, and if you wanna see more
with all the terminology in place, go check
out this academic article that we wrote together.”
L: One thing I really like about the article
is it allowed us to revisit some data that
you already had and come up with an analysis
of how that fits into this emoji-as-gesture
paradigm.
G: It let me solve some of the questions and
things that I had been wondering about from
this earlier data. One of the things that
was really interesting that came up – so
I did a study with a smartphone keyboard app
looking at millions of anonymised examples
of how real people use emoji in aggregate.
One of the things that we came across really
early on in this data – so I got them to
extract examples of the most common sequences
of two, three, and four emoji, because this
is a common thing that people do for a large
data set of words is they’ll say one of
the most common sequences of two, three, and
four words. So, let’s try to do the same
thing with emoji and see what happens because,
obviously, we couldn’t read individual people’s
messages. This is a way of kind of extracting
from that and figuring out what the common
sequences are. The most common sequence of
emoji overall is [tears of joy] [tears of
joy].
L: Right. Okay.
G: The second most common sequence is [tears
of joy] [tears of joy] [tears of joy].
L: Okay. Hmm...
G: Do you wanna guess what the third most
common sequence is?
L: I’m going for, hmm, [tears of joy] [tears
of joy] [tears of joy] [tears of joy]?
G: Yeah. Four of them.
L: Amazing.
G: Once you get to number four, I think it
was two kiss faces. So, it did change eventually.
We did eventually run out of [tears of joy].
L: Just moved on to more repeating sequences.
G: Turned out, we looked at the Top 200 sequences
of two, and then Top 200 of three, and Top
200 of four, and about half of all of these
lists was just straight up repetition of the
exact same emoji. This was really interesting
to us because a lot of the emoji narratives
and media at that point were really excited
about the idea of telling stories with emoji
of like, “Okay, if you have a [person] and
then a [tongue sticking out] and then a [hamburger],
maybe that means a person is eating a hamburger,”
or something like that. But that’s not what
people were doing. People were doing the exact
same emoji a whole bunch of times in a row.
L: I remember when you did that paper because
I was like, “Huh. That’s some really nifty
data.” When it came to thinking about this
in relation to gesture, there’s nothing
that really fits that with words. If you look
at the top combinations of words, it’s like
“and the,” “I am” – there’s no
repetition. You might occasionally get a “very
very,” especially in formal conversation.
But that’s definitely further down than
[tears of joy] [tears of joy]. If you look
at gesture, you often get these repeating
movements in gesture, often like an up/down
– if you ever watch the news without the
sound on, you’ll just see politicians doing
these up and down repeating gestures.
G: These very, like, podium gestures.
L: They’re known in the gesture literature
as “beat gestures” because that movement
is so rhythmic and observable.
G: Yeah. When I found out about beat gestures,
I was like, “Wait. Okay.” First of all,
it’s one of the most common gesture styles.
You can observe anybody doing this. When I
was in a café trying to write the book, I’d
look over and be like, “Oh, that person’s
doing beat gestures.” You don’t often
see people doing emblems in the wild. For
all they’re very exciting, they’re fairly
rare. Occasionally, someone will flip someone
off or “thumbs up” or something like that,
but it’s fairly rare. Whereas, you look
over to any conversation, you’re gonna see
beats. I was like, “Wait a second. Maybe
people are writing [tears of joy] [tears of
joy] [tears of joy] because that’s what
they would do in gesture.”
L: It makes sense in terms of the function
because a beat gesture is often analysed as
being used to emphasise the particular words
that they occur with. The more [tears of joy]
I send you, the funnier I find something.
Or the more heart eyes emojis I send you,
the more I completely love something.
G: Or the more plain heart emoji – even
though that’s not a face – the more you
love and support something or you wanna indicate
your enjoyment of something. All this repetition,
even when they aren’t specifically hands
or faces – even though they often are hands
or faces – seems to be serving a similar
kind of emphatic function as the fact that
we repeat our gestures so much. It was really
exciting to be able to drill down into all
of these different things that gesture can
do and be like “Oh, wait, yeah, emoji can
do that too.” Even though the stories that
I had been like, “Oh, well, that’s not
real emoji use because that’s just this
stunt thing that people do,” it was like
“Wait a second. But people do that with
gestures too.” People play games like charades
where they act stuff out in gestures. It’s
just that it’s not your typical type of
gesture. But it’s definitely one sub-type
of gesture.
L: It’s definitely in a playful context.
G: Yeah. It’s a similar sort of playful
context that people try to retell “Les Misérables”
or something in emoji. It’s the same thing
as trying to get people to guess, “Oh, this
is Les Mis” in gesture as well. It’s often
treated as a sort of guessing game where the
fun thing is can you guess what the other
person is trying to depict here. Yeah. So,
I wrote you into this book. We started working
on this academic article. By the magic of
how publishing works, the academic article
and the book are coming out pretty much the
same time.
L: I’m very excited for both.
G: You’re also writing up a piece in The
Conversation, which is kind of a more accessible
summary of the academic articles. There are
lots of different ways to engage with this
if this is something that you wanna dive into
more.
L: I’m really excited that it’s our first
full, academic publication together.
G: Me too! Because we’ve been collaborating
on this podcast for so long and yet there’s
an academic collaboration too, which makes
us just collaborators on more levels.
L: This is further knitting into my day job.
G: I think the most awkward part about this
though was, when I wrote you into the book
– and I had your permission to do that – and
I was writing this all along and then I was
like, “Wait a second. I’m gonna have to
refer to Lauren by her last name because that’s
how I refer to everybody else in the book.”
I’ll say their full name the first time,
and then in subsequent references I just say
their last name. I can’t be like, “Oh,
well, this person, just because we’re friends,
I’m gonna call her by her first name. That’s
gonna be weird.” But it’s also like I
don’t call you, “Gawne.”
L: Oh, my gosh. It’s gonna be so weird reading
that.
G: Yeah. You’re in the index.
L: Oh, I’m super excited about being in
the index.
G: I’m really excited about everything in
that index. There’s two different kinds
of sparkle punctuation in the index. Oh, my
god. The index makes me wanna read this book,
even though I wrote the book myself.
L: Of course, we’ve been talking a lot about
emoji but even though obviously I think it’s
the most exciting and important chapter in
the whole book for selfish reasons…
G: You’re a little bit biased here.
L: I’m a little bit biased and I don’t
want people to think that the whole book is
just about emoji because there’s obviously
a myriad of other great language-y things
that exist on the internet. This has really
just been a taster of Chapter 5 of the book,
which is the emoji chapter.
G: Chapter 5. I have had people say, “Gretchen,
is your book gonna tell me what this particular
emoji means?” It is not an emoji dictionary
of “Here are all the emoji and their cultural
connotations,” because that’s still something
that’s changing. That’s still something
that’s in flux. Your best bet is still to
go somewhere like Emojipedia or dictionary.com,
which is providing specific definitions and
cultural notes about particular emoji. If
you want kind of a bigger story that’s less
like “Here’s a list” and more like “Here’s
a bigger-picture view at how emoji actually
fit into conversation, and why we’re using
them, and why they caught on so quickly, and
are they still gonna be around in 50 years
or 100 years,” that’s what’s in the
book – plus all this other stuff about internet
linguistics like punctuation and memes.
L: The book is out 23rd of July 2019. For
many of you listening to this now, it is out
in the wild. You can read. I am excited for
you to have this in your future.
[Music]
G: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all
the things mentioned in this episode, go to
lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on
Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify,
SoundCloud, or wherever else you get your
podcasts. You can follow @Lingthusiasm on
Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr.
You can get IPA scarves, IPA ties, and other
Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch.
I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter,
my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com. My book
about internet language is called Because
Internet and is available at all good booksellers.
L: I tweet and blog as Superlinguo. And I’m
in Because Internet as “Gawne,” apparently.
To listen to bonus episodes and help keep
the show ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm
or follow the links from our website. Recent
bonus topics include animals, a very cool
linguistics job about figuring out how to
pronounce all the names on the radio, and
direction words like “right” “left”
“north” “south” in different languages.
If you support us at our new $15 Ling-phabet
tier, we will assign you your very own symbol
of the International Phonetic Alphabet and
we will recognise your support on our website.
Plus, anyone who joins this tier by August
15 will get a very special signed book plate
from Gretchen to add to your copy of Because
Internet.
G: Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay
too. We also really appreciate it if you can
recommend Lingthusiasm or Because Internet
to anyone who needs a little more linguistics
in their life. Lingthusiasm is created and
produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren
Gawne. Our audio producer is Claire Gawne,
our editorial producer is Sarah Dopierala,
our editorial manager is Emily Gref, and our
music is “Ancient Cities” by The Triangles.
L: Stay lingthusiastic!
