大家都愛Emoji,爲什麼Emoji符號這麼紅?

It started about six months ago, with a smiley face here and there, a sequence of pictograph red hearts when friends would send baby pictures or a string of blown kisses to say good night. I especially liked the face with a toothy, uncomfortable-looking grimace: "Yikes," it seemed to say. Perfect for "I'm sorry I'm late!" or "Eek, it's 1 p.m. and I just woke up."

這開始於六個月之前，一張笑臉到處都是，朋友發嬰兒照片給你時會附上一串紅心符號，或者用一串親吻的符號來代表“晚安”。我特別喜歡這樣一張露着牙齒，表情不爽的鬼臉，好像在說“哎呀”。它正好可以用來代表“抱歉我遲到了！”或者“呀，都下午一點了，我剛醒。”

Eventually I was replacing words with characters, adding a series of flexing biceps to the encouraging "you can do it!" text. Then one day I spent a full 10 minutes obsessing over the perfect way to say "I'm a writer. I don't do math" in a message to my accountant: [Girl symbol] (meaning me) + [Pen and paper] (writer) + [calculator] (math) = "?!?!?" Right, it doesn't sound so complicated. But by finding said emoji, putting them in sequence and spacing them out, I could have typed the statement 17 times. Mid-composition, I got a phone call from a source I had been waiting to talk to. I pressed ignore.

最後，我用符號代替了文字，發消息鼓勵別人“你能做到！”之後一定加上一堆二頭肌的符號。有一天我花了10分鐘給我的會計發短信，想用最酷炫的方式告訴她“我是作家，我不懂數學”，結果是：[女孩]（代表我）+[紙筆]（代表作家）+[計算器]（代表數學）=“？！？！？”。是的，這聽上去並不複雜，但是，我找到相應的表情符號，用一定順序排列，並用空格隔開，所有這些所需的時間，夠我用文字敲出這句話17次了。寫到一半時，一個我等着採訪的消息源給我打來電話，我卻按了拒絕接聽鍵。

This was emoji chaos; it had to stop.

這就是emoji帶來的混亂，不能再這樣下去了。

The roots of smiley faces and emoticons go back to the 1880s, but the story of the emoji, those little pictorial icons on your cellphone, began in Japan in the mid-1990s when it was added as a special feature to a brand of pagers popular with teenagers. It wasn't until 2008 that a uniform emoji alphabet was created (the idea was to minimize inconsistency across platforms), and Apple adopted it in 2011, adding it to its iOS5 operating system.

這些笑臉與表情符號的根源可以追溯到19世紀80年代，但是你手機裏這些emoji符號則發源於20世紀90年代中期的日本，由一個在青少年中非常流行的尋呼機品牌首先用來給自己增加點特色。到2008年纔有了統一的emoji“字母表”（用意在於減少各種平臺中的不一致），2011年，蘋果公司使用了它們，把它們加入到iOS5操作系統中去。

But what was once the domain of tech geeks and Honshu tweens has infected the masses. Emoji was crowned as this year's top-trending word by the Global Language Monitor, and it was added to the Oxford English Dictionary (funny, because it's a word that describes the concept of not actually using words). There is now a blog, Emojanalysis, that purports to psychoanalyze users' most frequently used emoji (take a screenshot and send); a beta site, , for the first emoji-only social network (yes, as in only emoji); and the Unicode Consortium, the nonprofit devoted to emoji standardization across platforms, recently said it would add 250 emoji to Apple, Microsoft and Google products. I seriously considered adding an emoji sequence to my résumé this week.

這種符號原本屬於技術狂人和日本少年，如今卻影響了大衆。“全球語言監督”機構把"emoji"這個詞評爲今年的最流行語，牛津英語詞典還收入了這個單詞（這很有趣，因爲它是一個用來描述並不真正使用單詞的概念的單詞）。有一個博客名叫"emoji解析”(Emojanalysis)，通過對用戶最常使用的符號，對用戶進行心理分析（可以截屏併發送給它）；名叫的試用版網站是第一個只使用emoji符號（是的，只有emoji）的社交網絡；Unicode協定免費令emoji符號在各平臺上實現了標準化，最近它宣佈，將在蘋果、微軟和谷歌產品中加入250個新的emoji符號。我認真地考慮這星期在我的簡歷裏也加上一段用emoji寫的話。

"A guy just asked me out in emoji [wineglass] + [boy-girl faces] + [?]," a friend told me, when I asked if she thought we had reached an emoji tipping point. "We carried on an emoji-only conversation for about 45 minutes."

我問一個朋友，emoji表情符的使用是不是已經到了臨界點了，她告訴我，“一個男人用emoji‘[高腳杯]+[男孩-女孩臉]+[問號]約我出去，後來我們就只用emoji聊了45分鐘。”

According to the website Emojitracker, which uses Twitter to calculate emoji usage, people are averaging 250 to 350 emoji tweets a second. Smiley faces and hearts abound, but there are more complicated sequences, too. There's emoji as punctuation [excited face], as emphasis [sob], as a replacement for words ("Can't wait for [palm trees] [sun] [swim]!") or to replace words altogether. (The accompanying emoji graphic, recently sent by a friend, describes a weekend date that started out well, including a trip to the vineyards of Sonoma County, but then ended with her realization that the relationship would go no further. Hence: a frustrated face symbol.)

Emojitracker網站統計了Twitter上的emoji使用情況，發現在Twitter上，人們平均每秒使用250到350個emoji符號。笑臉和心形符號用得很多，但也有一些更爲複雜的序列。人們用emoji作爲標點[興奮的臉]，作爲強調[哭泣的臉]，代替文字（“等不及去[棕櫚樹][太陽][游泳]！”）或者用來代替許多文字（文中附上的emoji表情圖是一個朋友最近發來的，用來描述週末的約會進展順利，去了索諾瑪郡的葡萄園旅行，但後來她發現兩人的關係不可能再進一步。於是出現了一張沮喪的臉）。

There is emoji for when you don't really know what to say, but don't want to be rude by not responding [Thumbs up], and for when you just don't really want to respond at all. "I love emoji because I don't like to make small talk," one woman said. There are emoji sequences to express real-life concepts, too. "In the wake of the Hobby Lobby ruling," said Caroline McCarthy, a start-up consultant, "I created an emoji sequence for ‘vasectomy.' " It was: [scissors], [eggplant], [screaming face].

在你不知道該說什麼好，但是不做回答又顯得太粗魯的時候，也可以使用emoji符號[大拇指朝上]，還有的符號適合你根本不想回答對方的時候。“我喜歡emoji是因爲我不喜歡閒聊，”一個女人說。一串emoji符號也可以用來表達真實生活中的概念。“在關於霍比·羅比連鎖店(Hobby Lobby)的判決出來之後，”創業顧問卡洛琳·麥卡錫(Caroline McCarthy)說，“我用emoji組成了一個短語，代表‘輸精管切除術'。是[剪刀]，[茄子]，[尖叫]。”

In their short life, emoji managed to find an exceptional cultural range: One Internet wit put out an emoji translation of Beyoncé's "Drunk in Love," and an emoji-only version of "Moby Dick," called "Emoji Dick," was recently accepted into the Library of Congress. Legal experts have even discussed whether an emoji death threat [gun and face] could be admissible in court. "I'm not sure you can really speak of it as a full-fledged language yet," said Ben Zimmer, a linguist, "but it does seem to have fascinating combinatorial possibilities. Any sort of symbolic system, when it's used for communication, is going to develop dialects."

在它誕生後的短短時間裏，emoji構成了一個獨特的文化圈子：一個互聯網達人用emoji表情翻譯了碧昂斯(Beyoncé)的《醉在愛裏》(Drunk in Love)，還有emoji版的《白鯨》(Moby Dick)被稱爲"Emoji Dick"，最近被國會圖書館收藏。法律專家甚至討論用emoji符號表達的死亡威脅[槍支與臉]在法庭上是否可以作爲證據。“我不能確定目前是否能將它作爲一種成熟的語言，”語言學家本·齊默(Ben Zimmer)說，“但是它的確具有極爲迷人的組合能力。任何符號系統被用於交流的時候，都會發展爲一種特色語言。”

As with any new medium, there are growing pains. "Even with my glasses on, I can't see those little things very well," said Ruth Ann Harnisch, 64, a writer and philanthropist. Emoji also tend to mistranslate when sent between platforms, or they get jumbled if you don't have the right font. So while a heart may be a heart on your phone, it may end up as a series of glitch squares on Facebook or if you read your email in Chrome. (Conducting interviews about emoji, over multiple platforms, was a comedy of misinterpretations.)

正如任何新媒介一樣，emoji也經歷着成長的煩惱。“就算戴上眼鏡，我也看不清這些小東西，”64歲的作家、慈善家羅斯·安·哈尼斯奇(Ruth Ann Harnisch)說。Emoji在不同平臺上可能會導致錯誤轉換，字體不對也有可能導致亂碼。在你的手機上可能顯示的是一顆心，在Facebook上或者用Chrome瀏覽器讀郵件時，可能就成了一個錯誤的小方塊（我爲emoji做採訪時，要使用各種平臺，簡直是一場誤讀的喜劇）。

The current emoji package has been criticized as too limited: not enough emoji diversity, and in the height of the summer vacation season, not even a lobster icon (no crabs, either). There's also a certain subjective quality to the sequences. Depending on whether you think the little face with the teardrop on his forehead is sweating or crying, your friend may have either just been dumped or been to SoulCycle. "I think it's clear that a rough grammar exists for emoji, or is at least emerging," said Colin Rothfels, a developer who maintains a Twitter feed, @anagramatron, that collects tweets (and thus emoji) that are anagrams.

人們批評目前emoji的表情包太有限：不夠多樣化，在暑假的時候，連龍蝦和螃蟹的符號都沒有。符號的使用也有主觀性。你覺得那張臉上帶水珠的小臉是代表流汗還是流淚呢？不知道給你發這個表情符的朋友是被人甩了，還是去健身房了。“我想emoji表情符中顯然存在一種粗糙的語法，至少這種語法正在形成，”開發者柯林·羅斯菲爾斯(Colin Rothfels)說，他的Twitter賬號是@anagramatron，專門收集各種由顛倒字母（也包括emoji表情）順序而構成的Twitter句子。

The Unicode Consortium, the agency that governs this sort of thing, is in the process of rolling out its new emoji icons — including a hot pepper (hot or spicy) and a man in a business suit levitating (jump). And yet, more options may only exacerbate a problem well known to those fluent in emoji-speak (or at least this person fluent in it): With no standardized keyboard, how are we supposed to sort through all of those options?

管理這類事宜的Unicode協定目前正在發佈新的emoji符號——其中包括辣椒符號（好辣），以及一個穿西服的男人身在半空（跳）。不過，更多的選擇可能會令擅長使用emoji交談的人們（至少是我這個擅長用emoji交談的人）本來就有的問題變得更嚴重：沒有標準化的鍵盤，我們該怎樣查看整理這些新的選擇？

It's enough to make anyone want to [scream face].

這真讓人想要[尖叫]。