Cowboy, Avocado, Fox
I don’t know when emoji stopped feeling like an addition to language and became the language itself. There was probably a specific moment—some conversation where a single picture said what three sentences couldn’t—but I can’t pinpoint it. Now it’s automatic.
Apple just released a new batch for iOS 10.2. Cowboy, avocado, fox, champagne, owl, butterfly, kiwi, peanut—the selection seems almost random. No clear logic for what made it in versus what got left behind. Maybe there’s a committee. Maybe it’s arbitrary. Either way, they’re there, and in a few weeks they’ll feel like they always have.
Getting them requires an update, which takes about five minutes. iPhones will have them soon enough. That’s how it works.
What gets me is how completely these tiny graphics have taken over how I actually talk. A single emoji in the right place does more work than most of what I write. That’s not a statement I’m proud of, but it’s honest. We’ve all shifted into a hybrid language that didn’t exist ten years ago, and it works. That wasn’t the plan, if there was a plan.
The new ones will show up on my phone soon, and at some point the cowboy will be exactly what I need to say. I won’t think about how much work a tiny image does in a conversation, or how strange it is that we all speak this way now. I just use it. That’s where we are.