This weekend, July 17 to be more specific, the world will celebrate World Emoji Day (who knew, huh?). And, guess what? There’s actually an elevator/lift emoji available to use. Yay!
Your author didn’t know this day of celebration existed, and also didn’t know the emoji itself existed until seeing a post by Liftec Lifts Ltd. on LinkedIn in preparation of the big day.
According to nationaldaycalendar.com, “The day encourages us to use emojis to send unique messages” and uses the hashtag #WorldEmojiDay. According to the site, emoji is a Japanese expression that roughly means “picture word” and was created in 1990 by Shigetaka Kurita, who worked for Japanese telecom company NTT Docomo. Kurita designed these “picture words” as a feature on the company’s pagers to make them more appealing to teens. When Apple released the iPhone in 2007, there was “an emoji keyboard embedded into the phone to nab the Japanese market. While not intended for U.S. users to find, they did and quickly figured out how to use it.”
Since then, emoji’s have taken on a life of their own. More and more are created, and they get used more and more to help us convey emotions and beyond in our mostly text-based communication. They’re turned into T-shirts and plush toys and beyond. And, some even spark controversy over what they actually mean.
On this World Emoji Day, though (now that we know what it is), we can’t help but agree with Liftec that the elevator/lift one is our favorite.
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