Why You Owe Your Life to Bugs & The Fascinating Rise of the Emoji

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Why You Owe Your Life to Bugs & The Fascinating Rise of the Emoji"

Something You Should Know
Host: Mike Carruthers | OmniCast Media
Release Date: July 10, 2025

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Introduction

In this compelling episode of Something You Should Know, host Mike Carruthers delves into two seemingly disparate yet intriguingly interconnected topics: the indispensable role of insects in our ecosystem and the cultural evolution of emojis in modern communication. Through insightful interviews with experts Karen Light Gibson and Keith Houston, listeners gain a deeper appreciation for the small creatures that sustain our world and the digital symbols that shape our interactions.

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The Crucial Role of Insects in Our Ecosystem

Guest: Karen Light Gibson, Author of Bug: How Bees, Butterflies, and Other Insects Rule the World
Timestamp: [00:30] - [28:22]

Mike beginnen the discussion by challenging the common perception of insects as mere pests. Karen Light Gibson passionately articulates the foundational role insects play in maintaining ecological balance:

• Foundation of the Food Chain: Karen emphasizes that insects are the bedrock of the food web. “Without insects, we probably wouldn't survive more than six months,” she states at [06:30], highlighting their role as primary consumers that support a myriad of other species.

• Pollination Powerhouses: Approximately 75% of the food we consume relies on pollinators. Karen highlights specific insects, such as the squash bee, which is exclusively responsible for pollinating squash, ensuring the availability of this staple crop. “Without those squash bees, we wouldn't have any versions of squash,” she explains at [00:30].

• Decomposers Extraordinaire: Insects like cockroaches are pivotal in breaking down dead organic matter, preventing environmental accumulation of waste. Karen notes, “They are super important decomposers. Without them, we would be covered in garbage” at [26:02].

• Highlighting Native Bees: Contrary to popular belief, honeybees are not native to the United States. Karen sheds light on the plight of native bee species, which are declining due to factors like pesticide use and habitat loss. “We have hundreds and hundreds of native bee species that are also pollinators,” she mentions at [21:28].

The conversation also touches on specific insects:

• Dragonflies: Karen describes them as “phenomenal hunters” with a 96% prey accuracy rate ([09:13]), and serves as bioindicators of healthy aquatic ecosystems.

• Ladybugs: Known for their pest control benefits in gardens, ladybugs are often solitary but can congregate in large numbers during colder months ([16:34]).

• Mosquitoes and Their Debate: While often vilified, mosquitoes are a vital food source for many species. Karen discusses ongoing scientific debates about managing mosquito populations without disrupting the ecosystem ([08:06]).

Additionally, Mike shares practical insights on healthy eating, emphasizing the importance of how we prepare food to maximize nutritional value, such as preserving the nutrients in strawberries and garlic ([28:20]).

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The Fascinating Rise of the Emoji

Guest: Keith Houston, Author of Face with Tears of a Natural History of Emoji
Timestamp: [30:34] - [51:24]

Transitioning from the natural world to digital communication, Mike engages with Keith Houston to explore the origins, evolution, and cultural significance of emojis:

• Historical Origins: Keith traces the concept of emojis back to ancient symbols like smiley faces on prehistoric pots and pointing hands in medieval manuscripts. However, the modern yellow-faced emoji originated in Japan in the 1960s, designed by graphic artist Harvey Ball ([31:27]).

• Etymology: The term "emoji" derives from the Japanese words “e” (picture) and “moji” (character), literally translating to “picture character” ([33:48]).

• Standardization by Unicode: Keith explains how the Unicode Consortium standardized emojis in 2010, allowing for consistent usage across different platforms. “Emoji became part of language. They become subject to the same rules or the same figures of speech we can use, like irony and sarcasm and metaphor,” he notes at [36:48].

• Cultural and Device Variations: Emojis can convey different meanings based on cultural context and the device used. For instance, a smiling emoji might appear insincere to someone in China due to design variations ([35:39]). Additionally, different platforms (e.g., Apple vs. Google) render emojis uniquely, potentially altering their intended message ([39:59]).

• Usage Nuances: While emojis can clarify tone, they can also introduce ambiguity. Keith cites an Adobe survey indicating that about half of emoji usage is ironic, such as using a happy face to express sarcasm ([36:31]). Furthermore, each emoji's interpretation can vary widely across different demographics and regions ([41:34]).

• Creation and Ownership: Emojis are public domain symbols governed by Unicode, ensuring no single entity owns them. Companies like Google and Meta design their versions, but the fundamental symbols remain standardized ([47:46]).

• Future of Emojis: Despite their popularity, Unicode has slowed adding new emojis due to the overwhelming number already in existence. “Once a character is in the Unicode standard, there's no formal way to get rid of it,” reflects Keith ([45:25]).

Mike and Keith discuss the intricacies of emoji communication, concluding that while emojis enrich digital interactions, they carry complexities that users often overlook.

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Practical Language Tips

Host Insights on Grammar: Mike shares valuable grammar tips, addressing common mistakes and clarifying usage:

• Bring vs. Take: “If the movement is toward you, you use bring, and if the movement is away from you, you use take” ([28:20]).

• Ironic vs. Coincidental: Understanding the difference enhances clarity in communication ([28:20]).

• Imply vs. Infer: Distinguishing between suggesting and interpreting is crucial for precise dialogue ([28:20]).

• Farther vs. Further & Fewer vs. Less: Proper usage based on context prevents common grammatical errors ([28:20]).

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Conclusion

In this enriching episode, Mike Carruthers bridges the gap between the natural and digital worlds, illuminating the profound impact of insects on our survival and the intricate dynamics of emoji in contemporary communication. Through expert interviews and practical advice, listeners are encouraged to recognize the hidden heroes in our ecosystems and navigate the nuanced landscape of digital expressions with greater awareness.

Notable Quotes:

• “Without insects, we probably wouldn't survive more than six months.” — Karen Light Gibson [06:30]
• “Emoji become part of language. They become subject to the same rules we can use, like irony and sarcasm and metaphor.” — Keith Houston [36:48]
• “If the movement is toward you, you use bring, and if the movement is away from you, you use take.” — Mike Carruthers [28:20]

For more insights and detailed discussions, listeners are encouraged to tune into the full episode and explore the resources linked in the show notes.

Transcript

[Mike Carruthers]

With the Venmo Debit card, you can Venmo everything. Your favorite band's merch. You can Venmo this or their next show. You can Venmo that.

[Karen Light Gibson]

Visit Venmo Me Debit to learn more. The Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bancorp bank in a pursuant to license.

[Keith Houston]

By MasterCard International, Inc.

[Karen Light Gibson]

The card may be used everywhere.

[Keith Houston]

MasterCard is accepted.

[Mike Carruthers]

Venmo purchase restrictions apply today on something you should know some common words people often use incorrectly, then the amazing world of bugs. Without bugs, life would be very different.

[Karen Light Gibson]

So there's the squash bee, which is the only bee that pollinates squash. So without those squash bees, we wouldn't have any versions of squash. And without a fly called the Chocolate Midge, we would not have chocolate.

[Mike Carruthers]

Also, how to make healthy foods even healthier. And you know those little emoji icons you use in texts? There's much more to the emoji story than you ever knew.

[Keith Houston]

It's almost not so much about how emoji are used as how they're built. The fact that they're voted on by this committee of software engineers who have to argue about how many beans is the bean emoji going to show? What type of bean is the bean emoji going to show?

[Mike Carruthers]

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[Karen Light Gibson]

Hi. Thanks for having me.

[Mike Carruthers]

So, bugs, to many of us, bugs are pests, right? They're annoying, they get in your house, they ruin your picnic. So how do we look at this differently?

[Karen Light Gibson]

Without insects, we would not live very long. There is a famous ecologist who says that without insects, we probably wouldn't survive more than six months. And the reason for that is they are the base of the food chain. So every animal that we rely on relies on them in some way or another. About 75% of the food that we eat is pollinated exclusively by pollinators. And also without insects or other invertebrates, we would be completely covered in trash simply because they are our main decomposers who break down all of the dead things. So without them, we would not have food and we would be covered in trash. So we rely on them pretty heavily.

[Mike Carruthers]

Well, that's a really good response and a good reason not to loathe insects the way many of us do. But then again, you think, well, okay, what about mosquitoes? Couldn't we live without them? I mean, from what I understand, mosquitoes are like the biggest killer in the world because of the disease they carry. They kill people, they kill animals. Couldn't we live without mosquitoes?

[Karen Light Gibson]

Yeah, that is an insect that is often brought up in terms of, well, couldn't we do without it? And there are some entomologists who believe that maybe we could live without them. Others argue that we couldn't simply because they are such a large food source for other insects, but also for other animals. Bats rely pretty heavily on mosquitoes for food. So I think that what a lot of entomologists are trying to do are figure out ways to sterilize mosquitoes. So what they do is they sterilize the males and then release huge numbers of them in order to make it so they can't actually mate. So it's kind of a debate amongst entomologists whether or not we could live without mosquitoes. But we do know that they are an important food source and they are working on ways to reduce numbers.

[Mike Carruthers]

So in your view, as somebody who really is into this, what's the coolest bug and why?

[Karen Light Gibson]

Oh, I would have to say my favorite insect is the dragonfly for a variety of reasons. They're one insect that has an interesting life where as babies and teenagers, they live in the water, and as adults, they live on land. So they are important for aquatic ecosystems as well as terrestrial ecosystems. They are also a really important bio indicator, meaning that their presence in water indicates healthy water. And they are phenomenal hunters. They're actually the best hunters in the world in terms of accuracy. So they get their prey about 96% of the time, which is higher than almost any other animal on earth. So they're pretty cool. They're also just gorgeous, which I think helps.

[Mike Carruthers]

That's really amazing. I never knew that. And I want to ask you, when you say they, they live. When they're young, they live in the water. What do you mean, in the water? I mean, I see them skimming over water, but when you mean like a fish, they're in the water?

[Karen Light Gibson]

Yes. Dragonflies lay their eggs in the water. The eggs then hatch, and they are pretty vicious predators in water. They like to hang out on the bottom. They. They will eat other insects or invertebrates that are in the water, but then they will also eat things like fish or like small fish, obviously, or other types of aquatic animals, tadpoles, things like that. They then crawl out of the water. They stay close to the water, obviously, but they crawl onto a rock or a plant, they break out of their shell as fully formed adults and then fly away. They often stay close to water as adults because, as I mentioned, they have to lay their eggs there, but the first half of their life is spent in the water as an aquatic predator.

[Mike Carruthers]

Well, I'm sure there's a million different ways to categorize bugs, insects, but two interesting categories from my perspective is the ones that everybody hates, like cockroaches and mosquitoes. And then there's the bugs. They're still bugs, but people like them. Butterflies and dragonflies, they're beautiful.

[Karen Light Gibson]

So when we think of animals that people really like, like elephants or giraffes, we call that charismatic megafauna. Megafauna, meaning very large animals. There are a couple entomologists who have coined the term charismatic minifauna. And butterflies and bees are often the animals that fit that category of charismatic mini fauna. And those are the insects that tend to be more liked than others.

[Mike Carruthers]

So a common, especially in the summertime, you know, a common pest that people deal with is house flies. And you wonder, how did that fly get in here? I don't know how it got in. Do you know how it got in here?

[Karen Light Gibson]

Well, There are lots of ways that they get in. The other day I was, I picked up an insect that was in the house, an earwig. And as I was setting the earwig outside, a fly flew in the front door and I was like, ah, I knew it. So sometimes they just pop in when we're least expecting them. We also insects are small and are able to fit through surprisingly tiny cracks. So say you have a window that doesn't really look like to you that anything can get through the bottom. Insects will often find a way to get in. They may also come in on things like flowers or food. Good news about houseflies is they often don't congregate. Right. You don't see huge numbers of them. They are definitely annoying, but the chances of them causing any harm are very low. The chances of them causing annoyance are very high.

[Mike Carruthers]

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[Karen Light Gibson]

So ladybugs are another one of those charismatic mini fauna species. Most people like ladybugs, which is great because they actually can be pretty important for pest control in gardens. They will congregate in large numbers as the temperature goes down. Every once in a while, people will see they like to come indoors because it's cold, so. So some people will see huge numbers of them inside windowpane. In terms of mating, there's so much of the insect world we don't see because it's tiny and it happens quickly. Mating in most insects happens very fast and they are able to, depending on the species, lay eggs after they have mated a single time. So sometimes they'll mate once and then that's all they need to lay hundreds of eggs. Throughout the rest of the season, you will often see them on the underside of plants, so the underside of leaves, especially plants that have lots of aphids. So their larva you probably see almost as frequently as you see adults. But you may not recognize them. They look very different from adults. The reason you don't see them a lot is because they're pretty secretive, as most insects are. They're often on the underside of plants and their larva are completely unrecognizable from the adults.

[Mike Carruthers]

So grasshoppers and crickets, I assume they're related. And when I watch them, you know, when you get close to one, it jumps. And I get the sense of almost that they don't even know where they're going, that they just. They jump out of panic and they land wherever they land. But that can't be true. They must have some idea what they're doing. They're not just jumping out of fear and hopes that they land in a safe place.

[Karen Light Gibson]

With grasshoppers, you're right, similar to butterflies, the movement can be fairly erratic, so so as to be confusing to predators like birds. Right. Because if birds don't know where they're going, there's less of a chance they're going to get eaten. So when they actually jump, they may not know exactly where they're going. But a lot of insects are able to know directions based on. Some insects use the Milky Way to determine where they're going.

[Mike Carruthers]

And so when they jump, is it just the power of their legs that allows them to jump so high, or is there some flying going on in.

[Karen Light Gibson]

There with a lot of grasshoppers? More so grasshoppers than crickets. They have extremely powerful muscles in their legs that allow them to jump very far. But then you're right, a lot of times you'll see the wings of a grasshopper open as they jump. So not only are their legs super powerful, but then they're able to kind of glide from there with their wings. Crickets, you don't see, use their wings as much. There are actually a lot of insects that have wings that don't fly particularly well, but it may help them a little bit, you know, further than their jump would on its own.

[Mike Carruthers]

And so that, that sound that you hear on a summer night of crickets.

[Karen Light Gibson]

Yes.

[Mike Carruthers]

I've always been told that's like a mating call. Is that true?

[Karen Light Gibson]

Oh, yes. That is a. That is their love language. What's really interesting, though, is each species of cricket has a completely different sound. So there are, you know, 900 species or whatever in the US and they all have a different call.

[Mike Carruthers]

I didn't know that. And they all sound the same to me. But, you know.

[Karen Light Gibson]

I know, but it's the same with katydids, and it's the same with a lot of animals who use calls or light flashes or anything like that for mating. It's very species specific.

[Mike Carruthers]

And is it the males doing the calling or do they call each other?

[Karen Light Gibson]

Well, so for calls, it's most often the males doing the calling. For things like fireflies, there are specific flash patterns that males use, but females also respond using particular flash patterns for that species. So it kind of depends on the type of insect you're talking about. But when we hear lots of yelling in the trees from things like cicadas and katydids or that cricket, you just can't seem to find it's most likely going to be a male making those noises.

[Mike Carruthers]

Bees are one of Those bugs people tend to like somewhat. You know, they make honey, and so we like them. But I hear that they're in trouble, so what's the trouble?

[Karen Light Gibson]

So colony collapse was something that was brought to public attention 15, 10 to 15 years ago. Now, there's a specific mite that lives in honeybee hives that causes lots of damage. It's one aspect of, you know, what's causing this colony collapse. The thing that most people don't know or don't talk about, including myself, up until about five years ago, is the species that are actually in the most dire need of saving are our native bees. So honeybees are not native to the United States. They are originally from Europe, and they were brought over here by settlers to pollinate food. However, we have hundreds and hundreds of native bee species that are also pollinators. They are dwindling in population because of lots of human factors, things like pesticide use, habitat loss, but they also compete with honeybees for food. So not only are these honeybees that we know and love experiencing issues with colony collapse, they're also out competing our native bees, who are also pollinators of all of our native plants and native foods.

[Mike Carruthers]

The bugs that pollinate, like house flies. Pollinate, Right. I mean, there are a lot of bugs that pollinate. Yes, true.

[Karen Light Gibson]

Yes.

[Mike Carruthers]

But somehow we think of bees as the ones that are pollinating.

[Karen Light Gibson]

Yeah. So bees are the top pollinators, which is, I think, why they get so much attention. They are the main pollinators of a lot of our food. So there's the squash bee, which is the only bee that pollinate squash. So without those squash bees, we wouldn't have any versions of squash. So I think that since they pollinate the most, they get the most attention. However, flies are the second most important pollinator on the planet. So everyone loves. Not everyone loves chocolate, but chocolate is fairly beloved by most people in the world. And without a fly called the chocolate midge, we would not have chocolate. They are the only pollinator of the cacao plant or the cacao tree. So without this tiny fly, we would not have chocolate. And there are many species of wasps called fig wasps. Without them, we would not have figs. They're the only known pollinator of figs.

[Mike Carruthers]

Fireflies, lightning bugs. That thing that lights up, is that a mating thing or does that do something else?

[Karen Light Gibson]

That is a mating thing. Each species has a unique pattern that they flash, and the males are normally the ones you see flying around. The females tend to hang out on a piece of grass and they'll respond with flashes of their own. But the males are the ones who are actively searching. And that flashing is all to find a mate.

[Mike Carruthers]

So what the heck is a bed bug?

[Karen Light Gibson]

I find bed bugs to be fascinating. I also agree that they're horrible. They're bugs that are related to cicadas. They're in the same family as, like, cicadas and shield bugs, so they have a stabbing mouth part, and they have perfected their existence. They've also evolved to have an extremely flat body, so they can fit into the tiniest cracks. And they are also extremely resistant to pesticides. And the big thing is they like to feed on human blood. They don't necessarily only live on beds. They live in any space where humans hang out. So people will oftentimes find them in their couch or any seat, especially a fabric seat. So anything with fabric and tiny seams, they like to hide in.

[Mike Carruthers]

One bug that people seem to universally hate is the cockroach. And yet I hear that their reputation isn't completely deserved, that they're not all bad.

[Karen Light Gibson]

The majority of cockroach species are not actually pests. So there's thousands of cockroach species, and about eight of them are known to be pests to humans. I love the American cockroach. I think they're wonderful. The first time I saw one, I almost dropped my cup of coffee that I was drinking because it was the biggest thing I've ever seen in my life. But they are a species that live in sewers that will, every once in a while be found in a home. They're trying to get out of it. But they are super important decomposers. They will eat. They're one of the ones where without them, we would be covered in garbage. So they are important. But those species that set up in homes are very, very difficult to get rid of and kind of can be the bane of existence for quite a few people and business owners.

[Mike Carruthers]

What's a silver fish? I see them from time to time crawling out of somewhere, But I don't know anything about them or what they do or anything.

[Karen Light Gibson]

They love humidity. They also love decomposing stuff. So they will eat things like hair or mold or anything like that. Silverfish are very interesting in that they're one of the oldest insects that we have fossils of. So they've been around for 400 million years. And they look very similar to how they did 400 million years ago. They evolved before most insects had wings. So they kind of just hang out mostly in humid rooms like bathrooms and just eat stuff that's decaying. They don't spread disease.

[Mike Carruthers]

They're harmless. Relatively harmless, yes.

[Karen Light Gibson]

But they are surprising to see if one should pop out while you're in the shower.

[Mike Carruthers]

So we have to live with bugs and there's certainly a lot of them, so we might as well get to know a little bit about them. And I appreciate you sharing this. Karen Light Gibson has been my guest. The name of her book is Bug How Bees, Butterflies and Other Insects Rule the World, and there's a link to that book in the show notes. Karen, thank you for being here and talking about this.

[Karen Light Gibson]

Yeah, thank you so much for talking to me. This was really fun.

[Mike Carruthers]

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[Mike Carruthers]

What do you know about the emoji, that curious little icon that so many of us put in texts or in posts. Some people say that emojis help to telegraph the tone of your written word, so people can tell if you're being serious or trying to be funny or sarcastic. And there are so many different emoji icons. I mean, just. If you just look on your phone, there are hundreds of them. Where do they come from? What do people really think when they see an emoji in your text? Do they help? Here with some answers is Keith Houston. He is author of a book called Face with Tears of A Natural History of Emoji. Hi, Keith. Welcome.

[Keith Houston]

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

[Mike Carruthers]

So when did the first emoji show up?

[Keith Houston]

It kind of depends on what you call an emoji. So if you think it's a smiley face, then there are little smiley faces on prehistoric pots, or if you think it's a pointing hand, then lots of medieval manuscripts have got little pointing hands called manicules, drawn in the margins, which were there to point out interesting bits of text. If it's a yellow, smiling face, then the first recognizable one comes out of the early 1960s, designed by an American graphic artist called Harvey Ball. And then finally, what most people might think of as an emoji is a little colorful icon they can use on their phone, and you can trace their lineage pretty much directly back to Japan.

[Mike Carruthers]

So when I think of the word emoji, I mean, immediately what comes to mind is the yellow face that looks like a sun with a face on it. But I didn't know that it went back that far.

[Keith Houston]

I think there are two ways to think about it. One is that humans respond very strongly to pictures of human faces. So I don't think it's surprising that we've been drawing human faces in different contexts for a long time. But then if you think about where emoji came from in Japan, I think there's a feeling that Japanese culture is somehow quite visual from Japanese scripts have got a lot to do with that, particularly kanji, which is the main Japanese script. So that in writing a particular word, you're sometimes drawing the thing that you're referring to. There's another particular thing in Japan that's often cited in the context of emoji, which was the Olympics came to Tokyo in the 1960s, and it was the first Olympics in the modern era that used pictographic wayfinding signs as opposed to just words. So rather than a word saying swimming in whichever language, via picture of a swimmer. And this is often held up as an example of kind of Japanese visual culture, graphic design, and when you factor in the prevalence of manga and anime, so comics and animated movies and TV programs and so on, I think this is often used to justify or to explain the fact that emoji as a concept, as a modern concept, arose in Japan.

[Mike Carruthers]

The word emoji started when and where did it come from?

[Keith Houston]

So that's Japanese as well. So it's actually two words. It's E or E for picture and moji for character. So literally picture character.

[Mike Carruthers]

Because now you hear the word, what is it? Emoticon. That, like, it almost sounds like it comes from emoji, but it's talking about emotion, not what you just said.

[Keith Houston]

Yeah, that's right. So emoticons are kind of a case of parallel evolution, I think. So emoji is in little graphical symbols, little standalone graphical symbols. And that was late 70s, early 80s. But then there was a guy called Scott Fahlmann who worked at a university in the us he was a computer scientist, and he was part of this discussion thread where someone had made a joke and it didn't travel. Jokes often don't travel in text or online media. And so he made a proposal, I think, tongue in cheek, to say we should use icons to delineate or to denote jokes or happy or sad statements. And he proposed using a colon, a dash, and a closing parenthesis to mean a happy face. And the same with an opening parenthesis is to mean a sad face. This was the emoticon. I don't think he called them emoticons, but emoticon typically refers to one of these little faces constructed using textual characters rather than actually being a native emoji. So they are kind of two different things.

[Mike Carruthers]

So in modern written communication, like texts or posts on social media, I've heard it said that people use emojis to clarify their intent or their tone or their state of mind, that a smiling face lightens things up, that that's their purpose. Is that their purpose?

[Keith Houston]

I've heard that sort of thing as well, I think. I guess in order for an emoji to be popular in general, it had to first be popular in Japan. I've heard it said that Japanese written communication was sometimes quite formal or is sometimes quite formal. And that emoji kind of punctured that a little bit. They brought a little bit of joy or sadness or emotion to an otherwise relatively formal type of written communication. And I'm sure the same thing is true for us and for people who don't speak or read Japanese as well. There's definitely a feeling of it brings literal and metaphorical color. You have emoji being used as slang or as codes, as metaphors, punctuation, even. So there's definitely something there. They do do something to a written language.

[Mike Carruthers]

But when you think about it, you could use an emoji in the same way that you use language in kind of a sarcastic way or an ironic way where you actually confuse the message rather than clarify.

[Keith Houston]

There was a survey that Adobe did, the software company that found that something like half of all people who use emoji use them contrary to their face values. So if you imagine looking at an emoji and thinking, okay, well, it's a happy face, this probably communicates joy or happiness or something positive. Half the people that are using that are using it perhaps in an ironic sense, you know, so glad you got fired today, happy face, or whatever it happens to be. So emoji become part of language. They become subject to the same. The same rules or the same figures of speech we can use, like irony and sarcasm and metaphor. So it's quite funny. It's actually quite easy, I think, to use an emoji in a way which is perhaps not quite what the recipient or how they interpret it may differ from your intention. In fact, I think there's a couple of nice examples of that. One is that emoji can actually have different meanings in different countries as well. So it's not to do with the language that the people speak, it's just to do with their interpretation of that graphical icon. So I've read that in China, if you use a smiling emoji with just standard kind of open eyes, so two little dots for eyes, and then a smile that can often be seen as a bit dismissive or insincere because it doesn't look really smiling. So you need to use one of the smileys where the eyes are little sort of curves, the little half moons, as if you're kind of squinting with joy, you can really see the smile in the emoji's eyes. And so that's a genuinely happy emoji. So if I sent a. A text message with just one of the conventional smiling emoji to a Chinese person, I might not be conveying sincerity. I might not be conveying what I expect. And so the second thing, or the second example rather, of how emoji can be a bit treacherous in terms of their meaning, is you may not see the same emoji that I've sent to you. So my phone presents a particular set of emoji to me that have been designed by the maker of my phone, let's say that's Google. And the maker of your phone presents to you a different set of emoji which have been created by the maker of your phone, let's say that's Apple. And so for a long time, for example, Apple decided to make the gun, the pistol emoji, look like a water pistol, like a water gun, to kind of make it less threatening, whereas Google still had a realistic looking gun. So I could be very angry with you and send you a gun emoji and you see a water pistol. So I'm sure the meaning that you derive from that, that you take away from that is quite different depending on the actual emoji you see. And it can be quite subtle. It doesn't have to be something as, as blatant as that. But emoji do differ. And in the context of, for example, an emoji in the courts, which is a topic that comes up more and more recent, more and more regularly, I've seen it suggested that when a jury is being shown messages, they have to be shown both the original message as it was sent, as it was seen on screen by the sender, and as it was seen on screen by the recipient. Because the emoji can change enough to change the interpretation of that message. So just picking a particular emoji that seems on the face of it to convey what you want to convey, it can be derailed by any number of different factors.

[Mike Carruthers]

That's really important and something I bet most people don't know. If I send you a message and attach an emoji to that message, I'm assuming you're seeing what I sent and.

[Keith Houston]

In some cases you are. If we're using the same chat app, for example, we're probably fine. But if I'm sending you an SMS message that doesn't travel through this kind of closed end to end communication channel, it goes out over a standard protocol, comes into your phone, and a completely different app may show it to you, a completely different manufacturer may be showing it to you. And in fact, interestingly, Twitter, or rather X, having gone with the water pistol orthodoxy for a long time, has now gone back to a more conventional gun. So there are fairly big differences in big platforms out there that can really mess with, with the meaning of the emoji that you're sending.

[Mike Carruthers]

So given all the variables that you've just laid out, an emoji in a message could actually muddle things up as much as it might clear things up.

[Keith Houston]

I think that's exactly it even just slang. So I'm of a generation where a thumbs up emoji is like a positive. Yes, I received your message, I agree. But for younger people than me, a thumbs up could be seen as almost dismissive or a really weak acknowledgement, like, yeah, sure, okay. Like you couldn't be bothered sending anything with a bit more oomph, a bit more motion behind it. The skull emoji, apparently a lot of younger people use it to mean I've just died laughing. So it's an alternative to the cry laughing face or one of the laughing faces. So these things can have quite different meanings based on your geographical location, the device you're looking at, or texting on, the age or the background of the person that you're talking to, even just the context. It's emoji is language, and it can be as precise or imprecise as language.

[Mike Carruthers]

I'm not one to use emoji a lot. I don't put them in texts all that often. I don't know, I just don't think that way, I guess. I like to have it that my words are expressing what I mean. So I don't need an emoji to support my meaning. I don't use them that much.

[Keith Houston]

I would tend to agree. It's interesting. Despite having written a book on emoji, I think I use them a little bit more now. But I'm not using them to communicate the main intent of a message. It's often to add something, as you suggested. But I quite often used to use them as literal illustrations, which I think is perhaps the most boring possible use of an emoji. But if I've got a shopping list on my phone, I'll put a picture of the thing that I need to buy a little emoji of it beside it. And it just brings a tiny little bit of joy, a little frisson, looking at it. So I'm not always using them when I'm communicating with other people. I do notice that some of my colleagues at work do, especially in instant messaging. It's rare that someone is writing them in an email, I think. And it's obviously they're pretty much excluded, I think, from sort of formal writing of most kinds.

[Mike Carruthers]

Well, clearly people use them a lot. I mean, if I push the button on my phone that pulls up all the symbols, all the emoji symbols, I mean, there's zillions of them. And I don't think that phone manufacturers would include them in the phone if people didn't want them. And if they weren't popular.

[Keith Houston]

They definitely are. I think it's actually quite interesting how they came about. So when they developed in Japan, each of these different mobile operators had their own vocabulary, and so they had to figure out how to convert. So when your phone received an emoji, it had to try and interpret it. Is it the same as one that I have? Is it one that I don't have? And then the same when I'm sending a message back that the phones had to kind of negotiate what different emojis they could send and what they meant. And then Google and Apple arrived in Asia. They wanted to expand. So Apple was launching the iPhone, Google was launching Gmail, and they both separately realized that emoji were quite important. And so they added emoji support to Gmail, to the iPhone. Google then went to this organization called Unicode, which is basically a bunch of software engineers who meet up in California every now and again to discuss how text should be represented on computers. And they said, can you help us standardize this? And Unicode said, yes. Emoji kind of at a stroke, became available for all of these different computer companies to start adding to their devices. And it just snowballed from there. So I think the first release of the Unicode standards that had emoji in it was in 2010, and there were about 700, and then they added a few extra ones from Japan, and that was the first set of emoji. And since then, I think there are now close to 4,000 different emoji, depending on how you. How you count. It's quite difficult to count because you can change skin tones, you can change hair color and type. In some cases, you can even change the direction that some emoji face. But there are now thousands to choose from.

[Mike Carruthers]

Listening to you talk, it seems like the correct plural of the singular emoji is emoji. Is that correct?

[Keith Houston]

That is the Japanese plural for it. Although now, recently, I think I've seen it argued that effectively, emoji is now an English word, and emojis is probably an acceptable plural. So I think you can go either way.

[Mike Carruthers]

Well, it seems weird to say emoji as the plural of emoji, but then again, we did a segment not long ago about Lego, and I got emails from listeners scolding me that the plural of lego is Lego and not Legos. So I stand corrected. So do emojis come and go? Like, do they fall out of favor, become less popular, new ones show up.

[Keith Houston]

Or what at the very top? It seems to be quite constant. So faced With Tears of Joy has been the most popular emoji for, I think, a decade or more at this point. And others kind of rotate around it. So I think the red heart is, I think, number two. And I think it's pretty much been quite. It's been pretty much the same again further down. It does drop off quite quickly. A lot of the emoji are just really, really not well used at all, which is one of the reasons why Unicode has decided to slow down the rate at which we add new emoji. In particular, they're looking at some categories like flags, and saying there's almost no point. Flags are used so rarely now, they can't take them out of the standard. Once a character is in the Unicode standard, there's no formal way to get rid of it. So all of these emoji will be there forever, as you say.

[Mike Carruthers]

Since you look deeply into this, what else about emoji that people may not realize or know about how they're used or whatever? Something that I haven't heard before?

[Keith Houston]

It's almost not so much about how emoji are used as how they're built. The fact that they're voted on by this committee of software engineers who have to argue about how many beans is the bean emoji going to show? What type of bean is the bean emoji going to show? They had a big argument in, I think it was it 2016, 2017, that was called emoji Geddon in the press, where some of the members of this committee were getting quite hacked off that the consortium that owns emoji was spending so much time on them, rather than trying to standardize all of the other characters, all of the other written scripts on Earth, which is kind of their main job. And someone had proposed a frowning poop emoji to go with a smiling poop emoji. And just the rage or the incredulity that this raised from some of the people who had to vote on this was quite a thing to see. I find that really interesting. I find the fact that we, the people who use them, don't really have any control over them. It's this random bunch of people, seconded by big companies like Google and Meta, who have the control over them. And yet again, another surprising thing is they seem to work really well together in this particular committee. So it's like, it shouldn't work, but somehow it does. So that, to me, is a constant source of amazement.

[Mike Carruthers]

Does anybody or any company lay claim to the library of emojis? Emoji does anybody own them? Does anybody make money off of them? Or are they purely in the public domain?

[Keith Houston]

So Unicode say that you can't propose an emoji which is a logo or a brand or has any kind of intellectual property associated with it. So in terms of the things that you can type, I guess the way to think about an emoji is that it's a little textual symbol. You can type in one application and send it to a different one, and it'll still work. It's like a letter. I can send the letter A from my texting application to yours, and it might look different, they might have different fonts, but we're both going to see an A. I can send you a smiley emoji, and they might look slightly different in the details, but we'll both see smiley emojis. So that's what they are. There will never be an emoji in that sense which has any kind of ownership associated with it. Also, there won't ever be any deities. There will be no gods. There will be no emoji gods. What people have done to try and make money is they've made things which look a bit like emoji, but are not, and they're typically called moji without the e. And so the first big one was an application called Kimoji that Kim Kardashian launched. And it was just a bunch of kind of stylized icons of her and her family that you could buy in an application and you could send them as pictures, so you couldn't send them in text. You had to send them as what are called stickers in different applications. And she made a lot of money out of this. And as a result of that, there was this huge swell of emoji apps for kind of a few years where every celebrity, anyone who is anyone, really, had their own emoji application. And I think a fair amount of money was made, and then they just kind of disappeared.

[Mike Carruthers]

But the artwork of an emoji, I mean, somebody had to draw that or design that or paint that. I mean, it had to come from somebody.

[Keith Houston]

No, that's true. So companies like Google and Meta will pay. People will pay someone to draw their emoji to keep them all up to date. Unicode has someone who does a kind of public domain representation. So there's not. It's really interesting. Unicode doesn't tell you what the letter A should look like. Gives you an example of an A, and it says, this should be an A, and it pretty much says, everyone knows what an A is. So this is a, this number, this, this, this, this, this code inside your computer means A, and it's up to the computer to display the A. And it's the same with emoji. They'll give you an example of a smiling face, but that's not the smiling face which appears everywhere. It's up to whoever is making an application or an operating system or a device to decide precisely what it's going to look at. So that might mean changing the color, it might mean changing the style. So Apple emoji looks slightly different to Google emoji, which looks slightly different to Facebook emoji and so on. So you're absolutely right. Someone is being paid to draw these things. But I don't think there's like a hidden industry of people making money off emoji, I'm afraid.

[Mike Carruthers]

Well, the story of the emoji is a lot more in depth than I realized. And what you said about that. The emoji that I send may not be the emoji you see, I'm gonna remember that. I've been speaking with Keith Houston. He's author of the book Face with Tears of A Natural History of Emoji. There's a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. Keith, thank you for, thanks for joining us.

[Keith Houston]

No, not at all. Thank you very much for having me.

[Mike Carruthers]

When it comes to eating healthy, it's not just what you eat, but also how you eat it. For example, strawberries, if you're going to cut or slice them, you should do so at the very last minute because strawberries are sensitive to light and air. And once they're cut, their nutritional value begins to deteriorate immediately. Garlic, well, that's just the opposite of strawberries. Allicin, the cancer fighting enzyme found in garlic, actually benefits from exposure to air. So it's recommended that you peel and chop garlic and let it sit for 10 minutes before you use it. Greek yogurt, you know that that watery stuff that you find on the top of Greek yogurt when you first open it, so you probably just pour it down the sink. Well, that's whey and it contains protein and vitamin B12, along with minerals like calcium and phosphorus. So rather than dumping the whey out, it's better to stir it in tomatoes. If you want to absorb the lycopene in tomatoes, that's the nutrient responsible for or cancer and heart disease fighting properties, it's better to eat tomatoes cooked rather than raw. And broccoli is full of nutrients and steaming it is the best cooking method to preserve those nutrients. Boiling and stir frying were found to cause the biggest loss of nutrients and that is something you should know the next time you're in conversation about podcasts and they seem to come up a lot in conversation these days, mention this one. Tell people about something you should know and help us spread the word. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to something you should know. You might think you know fairy tales and you might think that they are cute and sweet and boring, but the real Grimm fairy tales were not cute at all. They were very dark and they were often very grim. On Grim, Grimmer Grimmest, we tell a grim fairy tale to a bunch of kids. Perfect for car rides or screen free entertainment. Grim Grimmer Grimmest activates kids imaginations and instigates fun conversations because fairy tales speak to all of us at a very deep, primal level and they raise interesting topics and questions that are worth chewing over together as a family. Every episode is rated Grim, Grimmer or Grimmest. So you, your kids, your whole family can choose. What is the right level of grim for you though, if you're listening with Grandma, she's just going to go for Grimmest. Trust me on this one. Tune in to Grim, Grimmer, Grimmest and our new season.

[Karen Light Gibson]

Available now from the podcast that brought you to each of the last lesbian bars in the country and back in time, through the sapphic history that shaped them, comes a brand new season of Cruising beyond the bars. This is your host, Sarah Gabrielli, and I've spent the past year interviewing history making lesbians and queer folks about all kinds of queer spaces, from bookstores to farms to line dancing and much more.

[Keith Houston]

For 11 years, every night women slept illegally on the Common.

[Mike Carruthers]

We would move down to the West Indies to form a lesbian nation. Meg Kristen coined the phrase women's music, but she would have liked to say it was lesbian music. And that's kind of the origins of the Combahuga Collective.

[Karen Light Gibson]

You can listen to Cruising on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes air every other Tuesday starting February 4th.