😤 Emoji History: face with steam from nose
tl;dr: Emoji names started out prescriptive, but we’ve learned over time that, since people see emojis without their names, we grow to imbue them with our own interpretations. Idiosyncrasies of early implementations often impact how we read and use emojis. This then forces all emoji implementations to standardize on their visual design, which supersedes any official name they might have had.
Okay this just blew my mind. That emoji up there. It currently has the localized English name "face with steam from nose", and I think it's often interpreted as a *harumph* of displeased anger.
However, it was originally given the name FACE WITH LOOK OF TRIUMPH back in 2010 when it was added to Unicode 6.0 as part of the very first batch of emoji. Here it is in the code chart [PDF]:
I’m not clear on the background here, but I assume like most early emoji I don’t understand, it was a Japanese cultural thing?
While Apple and google adhered more or less to the official line art, Microsoft and Facebook did not. Their early versions where more happy, but they eventually standardized. Historical views from Emojipedia, with year annotations added:
By Unicode 8.0 in 2015, they apparently felt the need to annotate it with “indicates triumph, not anger”. From the code chart [PDF]:
That is still how the entry looks today, as of Unicode 14.0 in 2021.
However, there’s also a project called Unicode CLDR (Common Locale Data Respository), which gives characters language-specific annotations.
I dug into the historical CLDR releases and looked for the common/annotations/en.xml
files.
As of CLDR 28 in 2015, the only annotations were “triumph; won”:
<annotation cp='[😤]' draft='provisional'>triumph; won</annotation>
But, by CLDR 29 in 2016, they gave it the localized English text-to-speech name “face with steam from nose”:
<annotation cp='[😤]' tts='face with steam from nose'>face; triumph; won</annotation>
The old annotations are still there, but the recommendation for reading it out loud has become descriptive rather than prescriptive. It demonstrates a recognition that we interpret emoji based on how they look, not what they’re named.
Emojis aren’t quite an independent language, but they have become a fascinating part of our language(s) that we’ve all been helping to shape over the last decade!
I think that calls for a FACE WITH LOOK OF TRIUMPH!
…but maybe not a 😤 because that’s not what it looks like to my American eyes. I think I’d maybe prefer a SMILING FACE WITH SMILING EYES: