Unicode 15.1 will be rolling out to phones and computers across this year. It will include lots of new CJK (Chinese Japanese Korean) ideographs, some new line-breaking rules for syllabic scripts, and a handfull of new emoji! There’s a phoenix, a breaking chain, a lime and a brown mushroom, as well as new family silhouettes and a handful of existing emoji, but now facing rightward!
The two emoji I’m most excited about are Head Shaking Horizontally and Head Shaking Vertically. That’s head shaking and head nodding to you! I wrote these proposals with Jennifer Daniel and the Unicode emoji subcomittee team.
Why the more elaborate names? Well, Unicode tend to describe emoji by form, not function. That’s for very good reason, because a head nod might be agreement for you, but in other cultures a vertical movement of the head can mean disagreement. This has provided a double challenge for emoji designers, who have to both show movement and also facial features that aren’t too positive or negative. Below are the Emojipedia pair. They’ve done a great job.
These two emoji are actually made by combining a classic emoji face wtih the horizontal (🙂↔️) or vertical arrows (🙂↕️ ) using a special Unicode character called a Zero Width Joiner (ZWJ, ‘zwidge’ to it’s friends), which means that even though they’re two characters they smoosh together to create one emoji. It’s the same process that makes all the different flags, as well as the gender and skin tones.
In fact, all of the emoji in 15.1 are combinations using the ZWJ mechanism; including the phoenix (🐦🔥), lime (🍋🟩) and brown mushroom (🍄🟫 ). Those new right-facing emoji are a combination of the usual left-facing emoji and a rightward arrow🚶➡️ .
It’s exciting that Unicode have decided to try this set of right-facing characters. Many emoji are left-facing, which is a legacy of their Japanese origins (the word order in Japan means that right-facing makes sense). I’ve been complaining about emoji directionality since 2015, and I’m glad that this update will mean that lil emoji dude can finally escape a burning building for those of us with a left-to-right writing system and Subject Verb Object word order. They’ve started with a bunch of people in motion. It will be interesting to see if this set is where it stops or not.
(no no buddy!! To the exit!!)
The use of the ZWJ is an elegant solution because it means that you don’t have to make a whole new codepoint for the emoji, it just uses the old one. If someone doesn’t have their phone or computer update to 15.1 then it should fall back to just showing 🚶➡️, which somewhat conveys the intent. That’s the magic of a good ZWJ combination.
In this new article I get to bring together three of my favourite things: gesture, science fiction and working with the best collaborators. I teamed up with genre author and creative writing expert Dr Peta Freestone and corpus whiz Jess Kruk to look at the different ways scifi gestures also have lives in the real world.
We used emoji evidence to look at the ways use of the Vulcan Salute (🖖) on Twitter references Star Trek, as well as nerd culture in general. There’s no emoji for the Three Finger Salute from the Hunger Games (…yet?), so we used a newspaper corpus to see what we could learn about this gesture. It has become a gesture of protest by younger people against a variety of regimes across South and South East Asia, and is becoming untethered from its narrative origins. For this gesture, newspapers provided a good, nuanced understanding of the meaning and function of this gesture.
This article partially started out of a blog post where I was pondering fictional gestures in scifi and fantasy. The article is part of a special issue of Linguistic Vanguard on the linguistics of scifi, with a special focus on corpus methods, which was edited bySofia Rüdiger and Claudia Lange. It’s fun that this article stands alongside lots of great articles including work on the sociolinguistics of Firefly, the lexical influence of Star Wars and changing gender dynamics on Star Trek.
Abstract
Research
on emblems to date has not drawn on corpus methods that use public data. In
this paper, we use corpus methods to explore the use of original fictional
gestures in the real world. We look at two examples from popular science
fiction, the Vulcan salute from Star Trek
and the three-finger salute from The
Hunger Games. Firstly, a Twitter corpus of the Vulcan salute emoji shows
that it is used to represent Star Trek
fandom and wider nerd culture, alongside its use as a greeting. Secondly, a
global news corpus shows the three-finger salute has come to be used as a
pro-democracy protest gesture across political and cultural boundaries in South
East Asia. These corpus studies show different trajectories for the two
gestures, with the three-finger salute escaping the confines of its fictional
world, while the Vulcan salute has come to stand in as a reference to the media
it originated from. We conclude with a reflection on the opportunities,
challenges and limitations of bringing corpus methods to gesture studies.
Reference
Freestone, P., J. Kruk & L. Gawne. 2023. From Star Trek to The Hunger Games: emblem gestures in science fiction and their uptake in popular culture. Linguistic Vanguard. doi: 10.1515/lingvan-2023-0006
Air quote gestures are weird. They’re weird because they have a really specific form and a specific use and meaning for people who use them. Most gestures that have these features are in a category of ‘emblems’, things like a thumbs up (👍), please sign (✌️) or fingers crossed (🤞). All of these emblems have a meaning and use even if there’s no speech. Air quotes, in contrast, need speech to make sense. So they’re weird.
They’re so weird I’ve been thinking about them since writing an undergraduate research paper about fifteen years ago. I had always planned to build a larger corpus, collect more data and say something more definitive about these gestures, but it’s been a decade and a half and I haven’t yet, so I thought I’d drag out that old paper and share some of the observations from it.
The earliest reference of this gesture that I found for that paper
appears in the July 1927 edition of Science. S. Francis Howard wrote to
the magazine of how a ‘very intelligent young woman’ he knew ’[raised]
both hands above her head with the first and second finger pointing
upwards’ (Howard 1927, p. 38) in order to indicate that she was quoting
text.
Air quotes haven’t received a lot of attention. Bäuml and Bäuml define the air quotes as a gesture of disassociation,
whereby speaker who uses the gesture makes a value judgement about the
credibility of the accompanying speech (Bäuml & Bäuml 1997, p. 153). Cirillo (2019) analysed a corpus of academic presentations for the use of air quotes (190 examples from 346 presentations). She found they exhibited a relatively stable form and were used to show the speaker’s stance towards the content being marked.
I looked at a mini corpus of 32 examples of air quotes from Australian television between 1993 and 2007 (ie. I watched a lot of tv and used this as a justification). Here are some observations from this data:
Air quotes have a stable form: two hands, palms outward, and somewhere between the upper chest and eye level.
There was some variation: some speakers did not so
much pulse the fingers as wiggle them backwards and forwards.
2 finger air quotes are more common than 1 finger, but they also occur.
Air quotes are found with a wide variety of lexical content, including verbs, adverbs, adjectives and nouns, and longer phrases.
For noun phrases, if there was a determiner it was never included in the scope of the quote mark gesture in this corpus.
The average section of speech accompanied by quote mark gestures was only 1-3 words long, and comprises of generally no more than 4 syllables. The performance of the gesture for longer phrases would terminate before the end of the phrase it had scope over. For example the gesture was only performed with the words “I love public” in the spoken phrase “I love public broadcasting”.
Sometimes the number of pulses of air quotes followed the syllables in the speech, sometimes the number of words. Some were harder to determine, so there was no clear answer as to what people are aligning the performance of the gesture to.
In this small corpus, air quotes had four functions; reported speech, sarcasm, distancing and emphasis - or a combination of these.
It’s really nice that a lot of what I observed in this small study aligns with Cirillo‘s much larger and more detailed study.
In terms of categories, at the end of the short paper, I suggested that maybe air quotes fits with Kendon’s (1995, 2004) category of ‘pragmatic gestures’ - a category of gestures that are used alongside speech and mark the discourse level rather than the content level. For example, the ‘ring gesture’ is often used to show precision or specificity of a point being made in Western discourse Neumann (2004). Cirillo also suggests that air quotes might be a pragamtic category, but notes that their origin as a feature of writing makes them particularly unique. It’s been fun to dig up this old work, and even though I won’t get to revisit it, I’ll still continue to appreciate the weirdness of air quote gestures.
Thanks to Lou-Ann Kleppa, whose email make me go back and dig up this old paper!
References
Bäuml, B. J., & Bäuml, F. H. (1997). Dictionary of worldwide gestures (2nd ed.). Lanham: Scarecrow Press.
Cirillo, L. (2019). The pragmatics of air quotes in English academic presentations. Journal of Pragmatics, 142, 1-15.
Howard, S. F. (1927). Quotations. In Science, 66 (1697), 38.
Kendon, A. (1995). Gestures as illucutionary and discourse structure
markers in Southern Italian conversation. Journal of pragmatics, 23,
247-279.
Kendon, A. (2004). Gesture: Visible action as utterance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Neumann, R. (2004). The conventionalization of the Ring Gesture in
German discourse. In C. Müller & R. Posner (Eds.), The semantics and
pragmatics of everyday gestures (pp. 217-224). Weidler: Buchverlag.
