Pop quiz: which of the following is a real job? a) unicorn rustler, b) emoji translator, c) hen’s dentist. The answer is b), but thus far only one such opportunity is available worldwide. In December last year, a job advertisement went viral. “London firm seeks specialist”, the BBC reported, and Today Translations, the corporate translation agency that placed the advert, received more than 500 applications. Keith Broni, 27, won the coveted position of world’s first emoji translator and, perennially at the cutting edge, Style tracked him down.
The application test remains online, however, so, before speaking to Broni, I immediately applied, just in case. After all, how else can one know if one is suited to a career that has only just been invented? Emojis themselves — the little pictures of faces, animals, food or flags that are now ubiquitous in digital communication — have only been in mainstream use in the West since 2011, when Apple released iOS5, complete with embedded emoji keyboard (for iPhone nerds, it had actually been hidden in there far longer). Yet now, only six years later, they have given rise to a standalone film, with The Emoji Movie released last week.
Page one of the emoji translator test was relatively simple: a frill-skirted flamenco dancer followed by a bejewelled crown was clearly Abba’s Dancing Queen; the Swiss flag followed by a neat little red-roofed house without doubt stood for the Tube station Swiss Cottage. Buoyed by my own effortless hipness, I carried on. Page two required applicants to translate into emoji the Boris Johnson quote, “It is time that we snapped out of the collective whinge-o-rama”, followed by a lengthy passage from Hamlet. I threw in the towel.
“It was amazing how many people saw the job description and passed it on to me,” Broni says from his Dublin base. While studying for his MSc in business psychology at University College London, he won the highest grade in his year for a dissertation on emoji usage, his research showing that a well-judged emoji can be a powerful tool of corporate communication. One of his roles is to help clients navigate cross-cultural emoji usage. Don’t wave in China, he warns, as rather than greeting them, you are dismissing the recipient from your life. “At the moment, we’re working on an emoji etiquette guide.”
Broni is keen to dispel the idea that older users are less enthusiastic or proficient than the digital-native generation. “More and more older users are employing emojis, and broadly they’re using them correctly. They just might not be up to date with the metaphorical ones, that’s all.”
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Ah, the metaphorical ones. The data journalism lab Prismoji found in a study that only 7% of peach emojis sent were used to represent literal peaches. A small number were used to mean “That’s just peachy”, but the rest — whether in the context of sex, the gym or one’s appearance in tight clothing — referred to the posterior. There is no bottom emoji, and users apparently had need of one. Meanwhile, the aubergine emoji is almost exclusively a penis. Emojitracker, a startling website that tracks live Twitter usage, consistently finds the aubergine the most popular vegetable emoji. No one makes that much caponata.
So what does the meteoric rise of emojis signify? Is English doomed? The short answer is no. Emojis are no more a threat to Shakespeare’s English than the txt spk that came b4 them, which is to say, despite much panicked noise to the contrary, very little threat indeed. Professor Vyvyan Evans, a linguistics expert and author of a new book, The Emoji Code, made headlines recently by suggesting that they could even be useful in schools, particularly in the education of children who don’t speak English as a first language, or those with behavioural or developmental problems.
Formal written English remains unscathed for one simple reason: texting isn’t writing. Because of the ease, speed and immediacy of texting, it far more closely resembles spoken language than what you see on a page. It goes without saying that written English already has an infinitely subtle palette with which to convey nuance of mood or tone, which is why emojis aren’t required in formal prose — they are unlikely to add much to a good sonnet. But consider texts as speech stripped of its tone and it all looks different. Emojis reverse what Broni calls the “negativity effect”, a tendency for people to interpret positive emails as neutral and neutral emails as negative. In his illustration, imagine emailing your boss to ask if you could leave early on Friday and getting back: “Fine.” “You’d be asking yourself, ‘Well, is it, though? Are we OK? Have I done something?’” The addition of a smiling face indicates the tone of voice in what should or could have been speech.
On July 17, World Emoji Day (chosen because it is perpetually displayed on the iOS calendar emoji), the CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, announced that more emojis would be rolled out later this year, among them a breastfeeding emoji and a hijab-wearing woman emoji. All of which is to say that if you secretly (or not so secretly) love a well-placed emoji, fear not. We’re not judging you. As the thankfully inimitable Kanye West once put it: “Thank God for emojis. So often one emoji goes a long way and lets me get on with my whole day.” And to that we say, Amen.
The Awkward Age by Francesca Segal is out now (Chatto & Windus £14.99)