I spend plenty of time looking for the perfect emoji. Especially as I only caught on to them about a year ago and often access them for social media on my smartphone.
All around me I see that emojis now play a vital role in courtship, news alerts and social media. I’m sure they’re here to stay and are only going to get more popular because they are cute and easy. And it is really great to have non-language specific universal symbols.
The problem is that the emojis on my phone are really small and I can’t see too well with my almost-senior citizen eyes.
So I spend a lot of time hunting for the perfect emoji, swiping left and right and squinting at my phone.
Sure I have some favorite emoji’s that I know are easy and simple and unambiguous But I don’t want to sped ages scrolling frantically through gazillion images to make sure that I have the perfect symbol to represent how I am feeling.
I am very careful with the flag emojis that I don’t use the wrong one – I don’t want to look an idiot on the international stage.
Emojis with Dirty Double Meanings
I stumbled up a steep learning curve with the heart emojis, not sure whether I was expressing affection or lust and realized that depending on your keyboard or culture, many emojis have X-rated double meanings. The majority of emoji can be interpreted in one of two ways: at face value or to mean literally anything else.
When it comes to modern day dirty texting, it’s almost unnecessary to write long, suggestive messages anymore. (Not that I ever indulged in this – all the info here is hearsay). With just a few perfect emojis, we are able to convey our deepest and dirtiest desires to someone we are interested in. We know the Eggplant, rooster lollipop and even cactus could represent a man’s privates.
They say the taco emoji is used to represent her lady bits. And of course the Fire flames can mean “You’re hot”
Different Platforms, Different Emojis
Although the Unicode Consortium decides which new emojis get added to the list, each platform is allowed to create its own renditions of each concept. I seem to have a variety of emoji platforms depending on my device and the social media platform – what happens often is I know exactly which emoji I want to use and then find that it isn’t on the same platform I am.
If you want to see the differences, go to Emojipedia and either enter the name of an emoji, or pick Categories and go looking for your emoji. It will show you all the different styles
Prediction and Replacement
Sometimes I wish I had an iPhone, I believe that messages in IOS 10 has emoji replacement and prediction that replaces key words and phrases with relevant emoji characters.
But I have a Huawei smartphone – the phone that the CIA says China uses for espionage.
Android phones don’t always show the latest emojis which means that mysterious squares often appear when I look at tweets or messages from people with iOS phones.
To overcome my iPhone envy, I have installed SwiftKey, an emoji compatible keyboard from the Playstore.
So now I have a whole bunch of good looking emojis to use – and I still get lost, so I end up using the same three of four smilies.
I do use other emojis now and then when I have time to hunt for them.
I’m pretty good with the celebration emojis, the flags and the cat ones. I think the trick is to find the perfect emoji is confidence – after all, emoji are open to interpretation, so one just has to go for it.
