Emoji are used so often and in such volume that it feels as though they’ve been with us forever. In fact, it wasn’t until Apple released an emoji keyboard in 2011 that the Cambrian exploji ensued, a flowering to rival the birth of any language. Linguists might dispute the term—languages have verbs, emoji (probably) do not—but the emojicabulary continues to expand every year.
Angela Guzman was an intern at Apple when she helped design about 500 of the company's early emoji, including one very explicit piece of fruit. —Ellen Airhart
Q: At the time, did you think the eggplant looked phallic?
A: It literally never crossed my mind.
What was your intention?
To make all the fruit and veggies part of a single set, visually. That meant they all had to take up the same amount of space. To make the eggplant fit, I placed
it diagonally.
Which, uh, triggered certain associations.
It’s grown in popularity in ways that I did not anticipate.
What emoji do you want to see next?
Plantains. I love the side dish.
When Zika erupted in South America, doctors struggled to alert the public. There wasn’t a language capable of crossing barriers of environment, education, and ethnicity. Except, some hip scientists realized, emoji.
They suggested a mosquito icon, which Unicode approved in February—along with half a dozen other science-y symbols, such as a test tube. Proposals for an Erlenmeyer flask and Bunsen burner, however, were rejected. —A.P.
This article appears in the July issue. Subscribe now.
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