Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/06/25/what-does.html
Glad you asked.
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Thank goodness someone is here to explain these things to me.
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It’s obviously a lady Zando-Zan.
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I could handle the basic emoticons (like colon-hyphen-right paren), but emoji have never made sense to me. Now I’m getting an emoji explained to me, and the translation offered is “it is what it is”, which is a sentence already well known to me for its useless meaninglessness. (Anything is what it is. It’s a tautology! It contains no information!)
I want my millennium back; this one sucks. Get off my lawn.
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Actually, I’m finding it kind of interesting really looking at the way different emoji character sets make this one land. Humans are programmed to interpret very subtle differences in the shapes of eyes and mouths, and I feel like these two have substantially different auras as a result:
The BBS offers a third, imo more unsettling variation:
Which on a black background also becomes… unintentionally unfortunate:
My conclusion: key factors are perception of curvature of the corners of the mouth (influenced by overall upper lip curvature direction, size, and shading), proportion of iris to sclera in eyes (position of iris would also have a large effect, but is relatively consistent), and relative vertical positioning of corners of mouth and corners of eyes (when mouth is higher than eyes it looks weirder).
Also, emoji are weird and the only reason this combination has a particular meaning is because a community decided it does. Get off my lawn.
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emojis, created ostensibly to express what mere words failed to express (in a single glyph), now are starting to come together to form … words. (here’s the mojiword levitating man in suit, amphora, diya lamp
…i think that expresses the notion pret-ty clearly, no?)
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I get it - as in “I’d rather vote for Biden than Sanders, because I’m so scared of trump wining I’ll give away our future to big money”
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wait. don’t tell me: zoomers came up with this, right? stop goofing around, zoomers, and stay focused! we need you to help get rid of the orange cheeto dictator so we can save the country!
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“Get a good look, Alex, you can bet your asteroids you’ll be seeing more of them.”
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It means you’re a Furby.
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I not only would never have guessed the alleged meaning; but still don’t see it now that I’ve been provided with written instructions.
Either damn kids these days need to get over their pictographs and get an alphabet; or my skill in parsing human facial expressions remains dismal. Possibly both.
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Functional grammar fail here, we need better standards of emoticon literacy.
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I have to disagree. Like yes, the sentence itself is meaningless but that’s not terribly unique of an idiom. There’s some form of “it is what it is” in nearly all cultures and almost universally used to express resignation and acceptance of things you can’t control.
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I am that which I am.
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And that is all of which that you am
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No matter where you go, there you are.
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To me, it says, “Oh, gawd, what did Trump do now??”
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∴ 
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