BMJ Christmas 2018: Is it time to start using emoji in medical literature?
13 replies, posted
Ok boys and gals, it's time for our yearly BMJ shitpost. Today featuring emojis.
https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5033
The most important takeaway:
Contextual evolution in the meaning of emoji may convey a completely unintended message when the intended use was completely innocent
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/111764/2d2acdc6-4b57-42f3-9dd3-303344d08791/image.png
How about we leave emojis just in texting instead?
It's not serious, I know it's from the BMJ which is a real-deal British medical journal but they do this kind of thing every year as a laugh.
𓀟𓍄𓈳𓃰
pardon me, just moving my hieroglyphics on through
𓆏𓄙𓀦𓁲
https://narry.land/GaJcZ0.png
Because many fonts conveniently leave that character out
literature has already adopted it. emojis are the future
https://publishingperspectives.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/emjoi-covers-1.jpeg
What the fuck is this
All I can see
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/109829/940b4d25-f63d-4a46-982a-5368b3e04685/SmartSelect_20181213-082003_Google.jpg
Im down with emojies being actually included as real language symbols in the future
An actual person thought this was a good idea.
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/292/671/44f.png
this is what's really wrong with this world
I don't even know what 87% of Emoji are even supposed to mean or represent. How can they be seriously adapted to anything?
This is the problem.
We have twenty-six letters in the English language to convey words. When we don't know the definition of it, we type the word into a search engine or look for it in a dictionary.
Words can be sorted alphabetically; they can be CAPITALIZED and lowercased; they can be italicized, underlined, and bolded.
Emojis look different on every device. It is often hard to understand what an emoji represents, and even if you do, the person who sent it may have sent something that looks completely different to them, thereby completely changing the meaning of their message.
There's a reason pictographic languages are considered extremely difficult, and often converge towards a simplified set of symbols over time.
How is this different from how written language is used? You can't say you can completely, 100% understand someone's meaning and motivations from how someone speaks to you. In linguistics terminology, utterances will have their locutionary act (what they say) and the illocutionary act (what they intend to accomplish by what they said). Even though you know the locutionary act, you can only guess the illocutionary act, even if it is obvious and you get it right most of the time.
In the same vein that an emoji may be taken the wrong way by the recipient, so might a string of words. Jokes offend, sarcasm and irony go unrecognised, emotive speech is taken as hysterical and clinical speech is taken as impassionate.
There are no pictographic writing systems (important distinction between language and writing system) in today's world, pictographic writing systems have the issue of not being complex enough and generally haven't lasted outside of the Bronze Age. The one you're probably thinking of, Chinese, only has a small amount of total characters (around 600, and even then, most of them are stylised and it's hard to tell what they are pictographs of) that are pictographic. The majority of Chinese characters use a system of ideographs, compound ideographs, semantic compounds, and homophones which would take a bit too long to explain here.
This also isn't to say that such a system is particularly complex. How it functions is actually quite easy, becoming literate is more an effort in perserverance and exposure than it is intelligence, the present-day literacy rates in Japan and China have are high and show no signs of obvious problems.
Alphabetic order is arbitrary. If emojis were to be used as a writing system, something would come up to categorise them. Capitalisation is not universal, many writing systems that even classify as alphabetic (like Hangul) do not have capital letters. Italics, underlining, and bolding are using visual elements and are open to your issue with ambiguity you have with emojis.
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