Since there aren’t enough conspiracy theories abounding these days, I thought I would share one that you may have missed.  Since 1991 the Unicode Consortium has been overseeing the character inventory of electronic text processing. They set the standard for symbols, characters in different scripts and – last, but not least – emojis. By controlling emojis, they control the way mankind shows their true feelings with other humanoids, making the written word less relevant. Oh, the horrors!

As you can see in this chart, emojis were like a benign fungus until 1999 when these cute little fuzzy things began multiplying like rabbits! Emanating from a lab in Japan, overnight we had over 1,000 of these spreading all over the world. The worst scourge from this first mega-blast, which has polluted the minds of my grandchildren, is the infamous Poop Emoji. It was alarming to realize that by age two, before they could read a single word, they understood emojis.

Then in 2015, emojis realized that a better way to infiltrate written communications was to appear more egalitarian. By altering the “Thumbs Up” emoji, humans of any racial background could signal the end of text conversations using an emoji that more accurately portrayed their skin tone. How sneaky!

And if this wasn’t enough, Statista’s Katharina Buchholz tells us that 2022 will likely see the release of 107 additional emojis. These include beans, the pregnant man and finger hearts, a hand gesture popularized by K-pop stars. This update would bring the exploding number of these popular pictograms to 3,460 next year.

I shudder to think what Mrs. Ermal Tucker, my Business Communications teacher at Harding, would say about emojis (God rest her soul). Even without them, she would “bleed all over my papers” when grading them with her red pen. I can only imagine where I would have been banished had I used the hint of an emoji.

Who knows whether emojis are making our feelings more clear or more hidden? I mean, are 45% of the people around the world really that happy (at least in the US, Portugal, Germany, and Italy)? While French people appear only about half as happy as the rest of the world, with 55% using the Heart emoji, we can see where their minds really are!!

I hope you will weigh all of this carefully as you go about your online business of communicating your true feelings with your 1,923 “Friends.” Be very careful that you do not mis-express. I’m just waiting for the first court case where someone was misled by another person’s emoji, causing them pain and suffering or some sort of monetary damages. Who knows where this all could lead?

Rick Adkins, CFP®, ChFC, MBA

© 2021 The Arkansas Financial Group, Inc., All rights reserved.

Written in honor of the great Otus the Head Cat and Owner’s award-winning column of  humorous fabrication  which appeared in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette. My life hasn’t been the same without them.

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