[Vhfcn-l] Monday musings

[Gary Thewlis]

I just need enough to tide me over until I need more.

Bill Hoest

 

Rage is the only quality which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied,
writing columns for newspapers.

Jimmy Breslin

 

Success didn't spoil me, I've always been insufferable.

Fran Lebowitz

 

There's only one way to have a happy marriage and as soon as I learn what it
is I'll get married again.

Clint Eastwood

 

Everything is in a state of flux, including the status quo.

Robert Byrne

 

Everybody hates me because I'm so universally liked.

Peter de Vries

 

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

 

Emoji

 

Dictionaries are hard to promote. They're utilitarian and unexciting works,
to the extent that their users find it hard to differentiate between
publishers and often lump them all together as "the dictionary". The
relatively recent wheeze of announcing Words of the Year has been a godsend
to despairing publicity departments and an annual opportunity for
lexicographers to slide modestly into the public eye for a seasonal rundown
on what's been happening with our vocabulary.

 

Recently, however, Oxford Dictionaries has done something really odd. Its
choice wasn't a word but a picture, an emoji, the one often known as face
with tears of joy.

 

The news was greeted with all the publicity Oxford Dictionaries might have
wanted, but much comment was puzzled or sarcastic. Didn't a dictionary know
what a word was? Did this render the idea of Words of the Year ridiculous?
Was this the death knell of the language of Shakespeare? Was Oxford cozying
up to the internet generation to the exclusion of more significant shifts in
language? Had Oxford jumped the shark?

 

Though the choice looks seriously misguided, this wasn't some mad whim.
Oxford's monitoring found that the word emoji increased its usage three-fold
in 2015 over the previous year, which would have made it a candidate for
Word of the Year. The little icons have become a widespread shorthand way of
expressing emotion and ideas in texts and social media; they've moved way
beyond the teenage texters who embraced them initially. Oxford Dictionaries
argue that emoji and emoji culture have gone mainstream in 2015, "embodying
a core aspect of living in a digital world that is visually driven,
emotionally expressive, and obsessively immediate."

 

Emoji have without doubt come far since they were invented in Japan in the
1990s, as a development of smileys or emoticons ("emotional icons"), symbols
created from keyboard characters that date from the earliest days of the
internet.

 

Emoji in Japanese (e plus moji) literally means "picture character". It
predates the digital world by at least eight decades, and may have been
based on the English word pictograph. The first use of emoji in English was
in the Japanese publication Nikkei Weekly in October 1997, referring to a
set of characters that had been created in connection with P-kies, a
Japanese children's show roughly equivalent to Sesame Street.

 

The popularity of emoji outside Japan was hastened by their inclusion in
various mobile devices and led to their adoption as an international
standard symbol set in Unicode in 2010 under names such as grinning face and
winking face. Faces are the most popular - the set included persevering
face, face screaming in fear (very Edvard Munch, this one) and
extraterrestrial alien face. Face with tears of joy was chosen as the Word
of the Year because it made up 20% of all the emoji used in the United
Kingdom in 2015, and 17% of those in the United States, a sharp rise from 4%
and 9% respectively in 2014.

 

You can select from 1282 emoji in the Unicode set, including cats, hearts,
hand signals, clothing, animals, plants, vehicles, the flags of all nations
and lots more, including man in a business suit levitating and pile of poo.
Their name might have helped them be accepted, though the similarity between
emoji and emoticon is accidental.

 

In an electronic world in which brevity and speed are key, an image is
potent, not perhaps worth a thousand words, but certainly removing the need
for a description that the writer might not be willing or well-equipped to
provide or have space for. But some commentators have gone further, arguing
that emoji are no longer just a convenient shorthand but a nuanced form of
communication in their own right.

 

Although Random House has published emoji-speak versions of Shakespeare and
Herman Melville's classic novel has been translated as Emoji Dick, neither
can be called nuanced: 1282 pictures conveying a restricted and
unsophisticated range of concepts is hardly a replacement for the subtlety
and richness of a natural language.

 

Caspar Grathwohl of Oxford Dictionaries commented, "The fact that English
alone is proving insufficient to meet the needs of 21st-century digital
communications is a huge shift". But it's a shift restricted to one part of
the online world. The suspicion must be that emoji are a passing fashion and
that to try to read into them a seismic shift in the nature of communication
is seriously misplaced.

 

Will the "Word" of the Year take its place in Oxford's dictionaries? There
are no plans to include emoji, the publishers say. A wise decision, you may
feel.

 

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

 

What do the initials S.O.S. stand for in the brand of steel-wool soap pads
marketed under that name?

A: Save Our Saucepans.

 

To a Wall Streeter, what is a shark repellent?

A: Any device or strategy used to ward off a hostile takeover.

 

For what is the NOW in NOW bank accounts an acronym?

A: Negotiable order of withdrawal.

 

What is the derivation of the trademark name Velcro?

A: It's from the words velvet and crochet which means "hook" in French.

 

In the world of economics, what does the acronym Gatt represent?

A: General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.

 

What do the letters represent in the over-the-counter stock market acronym
NASDAQ? 

A: National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations.

 

What did John Matthews do with all the scrap marble he bought from the St.
Patrick's Cathedral construction site in New York City in 1879?

A: Matthews, a manufacturer of soda fountain equipment, made 25 million
gallons of soda water by dissolving the marble (calcium carbonate) with
dilute acid.