Think of the word "gun". The image that entered your mind just now was not a water gun. It was a weapon, the kind of device the gun emoji used to depict and now no longer does.
The people forcing this kind of change want you to associate the concept of a gun with a water gun or other toy, and they think that by changing your though pattern this way, they'll make society safer.
This is terrifying and totalitarian idea. Once you buy into the idea that you can force a change to the language to achieve your desired social aims, there's no intrusion into private life that you will be unable to justify.
Very Orwellian. In 1984, that was the point of Newspeak - to make it impossible to express certain ideas.
I.e., if you choose to mean a handgun when writing a watergun, the emoji’s meaning can change.
Anyone born in the last dozen or so years.
When "pistol" changed to mean "toy gun", it (1) happened in two years and (2) was decided by an oligarchy of actors (and not even the Unicode Consortium oligarchy).
Can you spot the difference?
Granted, I’m assuming historians will use the emoji set at time of writing, but that’s not trivially available.
In the case of emoji, we're aceepting the idea that when I said gun, I in fact did not say gun, I said water gun. You can interpret the water gun as gun or water gun, but really I never said gun
this comment could be interpreted as a threat 50 years down the line, by the change of meaning over time, but any sane person understanding that history and context matter, with knowledge of how it would be interpreted today, would realize its not. But if we applied the same acceptance to text as we do with emoji, the whole thing could be changed such that in both this time, and 50 years from now, it would be interpreted as a threat. The same context argument could apply, but I'm also sure defenders of the change would also not see the need to maintain a log of how things have been changed, as I doubt they care about emoji changes today.
The words themselves aren't simply appearing differently; they're changing, right from under my feet. The only defense is that (afaik) the unicode assortium has not changed yet changed the naming for it (ie CRYING FACE EMOJI), but since no one in practice refers to that definition, its not a useful defense.
Thus, emoji in their current form are highly inappropriate as a medium of communication, except in the very limited use case of short-lived, impermanent, and same-implementation communications.
But since this constraint is not the intention of the unicode consortium, and this is not the intention of the groups/font-creators that support emoji, and this is not a limitation that the general user expects, then this is a very poor design.
Emojis have been accepted as intentionally corruptible communications, but no party involved actually realizes the implications of it. We don't change ascii (ignoring the latter 127 characters, which are open to any interpretation) except by accident and by intentional non-meaningful changes (changing fonts does not change the characters themselves, just their aesthetics [except I guess wingbats]), and everyone would throw a fit if they did, because the notion is absurd
UPDATE posts SET text="I hate brown people" WHERE post_id=17560983
Fonts and rendering and apps will change just like compilers and source and runtimes. aka bit rot.
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Want to preserve your output? Then print to PDF with embedded fonts. Or use screenshots.
Want to be able to recreate your output? Then treat your content like devs treat their software.
I used to write prepress and print manufacturing software. I also did a tour of duty as our tech writer. Our team's entire publishing workflow got a lot more sane when I treated it like any other dev task.
Make dependencies explicit, use source control, pin down versions of apps, drivers, fonts, OSes, etc (aka colophon).
Our "build servers" even had VMware images, containing our desktop publishing apps, used to automate PostScript, PDF, and web output.
(This is long before Chef & Ansible, CI/CD, etc. Kids today have no idea how good they got it.)
The meaning of the words will change over time, but not the words themselves. So someone who reads it will know what the words written actually were, and just have to lookup any differences in meeting between when the words were written and now.
Imagine for a second if we took Shakespeare and rewrote it with modern day English, and then made the claim the new version is the original Shakespeare... I think we would see the problem with that. But that is what happened with emoji. It isn't that people look back, see as collections of pixels, and realize now those pixels mean water gun while in the past they meant firearm. When they look back, they see water gun.
1. orthography also changes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s)
2. the purpose of words is to communicate concepts, if the meaning of the word changes the word itself has changed, reducing a word to its mere orthography is nonsensical
Not of things already written down. The long S written in the Constitution is still there. It has not changed, and there would be outrage for anyone to go and change it. Changing the emoji from one meaning to another would be like changing the encoding of utf-8 so that a now means e and e means a, meaning that and and end flips in every utf-8 encoded file that is viewed.
Any kind of writing system allows this. Translation changes the words, and can change meaning. People can mis-quote. And yes, over time, meanings of words change, as do the cultural contexts from which they came. None of this is unique to emojis.
The truth is that all communication has at least two parties, and there is never a guarantee that the receiver will get the message as intended. Even if you do craft "pixel-perfect" emojis, people still can (and likely will) mis-understand the nuances of your intended message.