Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.Do you speak emoji like a Gen Z? To most people under 30, the skull emoji means “dying with laughter”; crying-with-laughter emojis are extremely cringe. “Thumbs-up” is used sarcastically and means the opposite of approval. An upside-down face emoji typically means “this is terrible” or “FML” , while a fire emoji means something is hot or stylish … not that something’s burning.
Their discussions about which emojis to approve, and which to reject, remain confidential, but according to Jeremy Burge, an Australian emoji historian and former Unicode committee member, it’s a rigorous process. An entrepreneur and former blogger, Burge used to run Emojipedia, the bible for emojis in the way dictionaries and thesauruses are bibles for words. These days, he splits his time between Melbourne and London, where his TikTok videos, filmed from his UK houseboat, regularly go viral.
And there have been plenty of issues, some frivolous, others less so; Apple unilaterally changing the gun emoji from a weapon to a toy water pistol in 2016 was one of the first hot-button issues. “The gun emoji likely wouldn’t have even been approved in modern times, but as it was part of the original sets from Japan, it stuck around,” Burge says. For a while after Apple changed it, “an iPhone user could send a toy water pistol to a friend with an Android phone, and they would see a real gun”.
Burge tells another story about the time Ford proposed a ute emoji that looked identifiably like a Ford vehicle. It was successful but camethe Ford trimmings. “Anyone proposing an emoji is only proposing the concept, not the final appearance,” Burge says. “The final say for how it looks depends on Apple for most iOS apps, and Google or Samsung for most Android apps.