Do I have to 👕🍐🥚💡🍋 it out for you?
Why are celebrities so crazy about emoji?¹
Ringo Starr deploys them like he’s salting pasta water. The late, great Carrie Fisher wrote many of her tweets in a custom emoji alphabet so difficult to read that it sometimes required translation. And Cher is so into them that she once claimed emoji users were superior… in certain ways.
Linguist and emoji expert Tyler Schnoebelen categorizes the different ways Cher (and, by extension, the rest of us) uses emoji. They can be used as emphasis or decoration (“Chadwick Boseman ✨🌟✨”), as punctuation (“WHO ARE THESE MEN⁉️”), as a substitute for the meaning of a word (“We were🙏4CUBS”), or as a substitute for the sound of an entire word or part of a word (“We Feel Shame 🐝Cause Of trump & Wait 4 Him 2 Quit Or 🐝 Im🍑’d”).
Perhaps celebrities, who tend to have broad audiences that span continents, enjoy emoji’s appeal as a “universal language” that can be enjoyed and understood by readers regardless of their skill level in English. Maybe they see them as a way to seem fun, or relatable, or in touch with the youth.
Last month, Alicia Keys (or more likely, her social media manager) caught wind of a new way to use emoji:
When spelled out, the tweet reads SEPTEMBER EIGHTEENTH — the release date for Keys’ newest album. To which Kerry Washington replied: 🍊🐭🦒!
These tweets illustrate a novel kind of emoji-themed wordplay: emoji acrostics. In the past, we’ve seen emoji rebuses, as when Cher wished for Trump to “🐝 Im🍑’d.” (As Jane Solomon wrote in an Emojipedia article about this kind of emoji spelling, Lizzo played with the many meanings of the peach emoji last year. She tweeted her desire for Trump’s “IM🍑MENT” but also spelled out the rebus in concert by slapping her butt.) And then there are all those games and quizzes that ask you to guess or create the plot of movies and shows using only emoji. Emoji acrostics are a more labor-intensive variant, with arguably less payoff: instead of a whole movie plot, each string of emoji only gets you one word.
So what’s the point of these emoji acrostics? They certainly don’t make for ease of understanding. In fact, they do the exact opposite: encode and intentionally obscure the message, leading to a fun (or irritating, depending on what the message turns out to be) little moment of recognition when you finally realize what the tweet says. In other words, they gamify the emoji, in the same way acrostics do letters and rebuses do pictures and symbols. That might be why the emoji-spelling trend has caught on big with brands — gamification encourages engagement and interaction.
What’s interesting to me about emoji acrostics is that they take the universality out of emoji. The emoji 🐭, for example, is a universally readable ideogram, whether your word for it is “mouse” or “ratón” or “老鼠.” But when you use 🐭 as part of 🍊🐭🦒, it now only makes sense in English. To a Spanish speaker, Kerry Washington’s 🍊🐭🦒 would spell out “NRJ.” Emoji act as a universal language only when they’re not linked back to the words they represent.
This got me thinking of ways we could play with emoji acrostics. They could be a fun way of building vocabulary for language learners — in Italian,²
becomes
Or we could make them harder by using less common emoji — say, ⚗️ to represent the letter A instead of 🍎. (That’s an alembic, if you’re wondering.)
Vexillologists might enjoy spelling using only flag emoji:
Emoji have already been used in crossword clues, so we could even start incorporating them into cryptic crossword clues, like this one adapted from a recent Evening Standard puzzle:
😢 of an 🦉, possibly? (3)
(If you read that as “Cry of an owl, possibly?” and interpret “possibly” as an anagram indicator, then that will direct you to anagram OWL into LOW, which is a kind of cry from another animal: the moo of a 🐄.)
The creativity that emoji seems to inspire is one reason why emoji studies is a burgeoning topic in linguistics, communications studies, and other fields; and why grumpy complaints about emoji making us less literate aren’t just misplaced, but completely backwards.
Still, before you decide to play around with emoji, make sure you’ve got a willing audience. Most of us already spend too much time on social media, and not everybody wants to use that time working out sentences from pictures:
¹ Yes, the word “emoji” is both singular and plural, according to the Unicode Consortium, although the AP style guide recommends “emojis” as the plural.
² English: ”I LOVE WORDS”/Italian: “ADORO LE PAROLE”
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