【英语语言学习】情绪的语言
时间:2018-12-28 作者:英语课 分类:英语语言学习
英语课
Antony Funnell: It's often difficult to date the beginning of things.
Hello, Antony Funnell here, welcome to Future Tense. Today's show is about the astonishing growth in popularity of Emoji, those little weird 1 faces and symbols people increasingly use when communicating on phones and online.
For the sake of brevity, if not complete accuracy, we reckon 1963 might be the year to pick if you're looking for a suitable rough starting date for the Emoji phenomenon. '63 was a big year; John F Kennedy was shot, there was the Profumo scandal in the UK, and The Beatles released their first album, as you can hear.
[Music: The Beatles]
But 1963 also saw the birth of the smiley face; black dots for eyes and an upturned mouth, set in a yellow circle. It was created by a US advertising 2 type and it quickly became an icon 3 of the '60s and '70s.
Fast-forward to 1982 and a computer scientist named Scott Fahlman took the smiley face idea and adapted it for use in the computer world, this time not so much as a universal feel-good symbol, but as a marker to put at the end of a message, so that somebody reading your post could tell when you were not being entirely 4 serious, when you were having a joke. It was basic, but effective; a colon 5, followed by a dash, followed by parenthesis 6 for the mouth. And so the smiley face became the emoticon.
Then (and here's the crucial bit) in the late 1990s a Japanese man named Shigetaka Kurita who worked for a phone company took the simple emoticon and made it really fancy, and since that time Emoji have grown in number, nature and complexity 7.
Niki Selken: My name is Niki Selken, and I am the co-founder 8 of World Translation Foundation or Emoji Foundation. And I like the title Emoji Translator. I founded the site and the organisation 9 with a friend and a collaborator 10 of mine, Cara Rose DeFabio, who also does Emoji work.
Antony Funnell: Niki's World Translation Foundation website is basically a one-stop shop for information about everything to do with Emoji; articles, new research, Emoji-inspired art. You name it.
There are now hundreds and hundreds of official emoji available for use on Apple and Android-powered smart phones, the number is expected to top 1,000 later this year. And then there are lots of unofficial emoji as well, designed by enthusiasts 12 like Niki…well, just for the fun of it.
Niki Selken: You know, I started collecting Japanese stationary 13 when I was in college, with all of the characters, kind of obscure stuff too, not just Hello Kitty, and I really like this idea of how we can translate and mistranslate languages between particularly Japanese and English, and all of the wacky characters. And then when the Emoji were released for the iPhone I got very excited because I realised I could start texting or emailing in a way that felt…I don't know, it just feels more fun and accessible.
And then when I got into grad school I started looking more academically at Emoji and I realised that as the Emoji was rising, so was the amount of people texting and tweeting rather than emailing. And so the way language was shifting into these shorter, more digital communication styles, I think the Emoji became more popular because they could fill in that emotional blank that you were missing when you were just sending, you know, a short tweet or a short text. They actually hit the same part of the brain as a facial expression does, when you use the facial Emojis. So you are sending kind of a smile to a friend, literally 14. Our brains pick it up. And we might smile back when we see it, and to me that's really fascinating.
Antony Funnell: So they've been around for a while, but it's really this move towards mobile technology, the fact that mobile technology has really just taken off in such a massive way in the last couple of years, that has also fed an interest and a usage of Emoji.
Niki Selken: Yes, and it was particularly in 2010 when Apple and Google decided 15, hey, we want to partner with the Unicode foundation, who are the ones that decide what languages get encoded into the web, and they said we want to put Emoji on our platforms on our phones and we want to ratify 16 them as a Unicode language, like a real language and decide which Emojis we accept.
Emojis, unlike emoticons, were invented in Japan, so they are originally Japanese characters that were designed by a Japanese designer. So some of them, we don't always know what they mean, as people not from Japan, we give them our own meanings. But the fact that two of the largest computer phone platform folks were like, hey, this is something we want to put on the phone, made it accessible to everyone. And that's when it changed I think.
Antony Funnell: And it's that subjective 18 nature of the Emoji, that it's a depiction 19, it's a pictorial 20 depiction, but it's open to interpretation 21, isn't it, as you said, it's that subjectivity 22 that you particularly find fascinating, is it?
Niki Selken: Yes, and there's other projects online such as the NounProject which is where they have sort of a curated selection of icons 17 and iconography that is in the same vein 23 of this that designers use all the time when they are designing…you know, you think of bathrooms signs or other kind of road signs or things that describe really quickly what you are looking at. But now we have an entire language set of a ratified 24 Emoji of I think it's 850-something characters that are cross-platform on almost everyone's mobile device that has a smart phone, and that's pretty amazing. Everyone is seeing this and so it has become a language.
Antony Funnell: So is it changing the way people communicate? Some people just use them I guess to enhance the messages that they send, but other people like yourself are using them quite intensively. If you are using them quite intensively, are you modifying the language that you use to meet the Emoji that are there?
Niki Selken: Almost it makes me more thoughtful. So I had a friend who came and visited me recently, went back to San Francisco, and when she left I thought for a while what can I say? Well, I can't say how I feel, I miss her very much, so I sent her like a little Emoji poem of my feelings, of her in New York with the New York Statue of Liberty Emoji, a heart and a plane and the San Francisco Golden Gate Bridge. I tried to create a visual poem of my feelings because I felt like that spoke 25 more and meant more than me just saying 'I'll miss you', which everyone says.
I think that because it activates 27 the right side of our brains, whereas words activate 26 the left, that when we are looking at an Emoji we may be feeling something differently than when we read something, and feeling it in a different way because our brain is processing it differently. So I do think that Emojis…I don't know if it makes us more intimate, but I think it has the potential to make us close in a different way than if we are texting. And it also makes us more thoughtful because it's not innate 28 yet, it's still a new language, so you have to really think about it when you are choosing your Emoji, what you're doing.
As people become more accustomed to them, and that's part of the Emoji Dictionary project, is helping 29 people get more fluent, but I think for now any time you have to be thoughtful about something, it's more meaningful.
Fred Benenson: Hi, my name is Fred Benenson, I run the data team at Kickstarter, I'm based out of New York City. Emoji Dick was a project I made to translate Herman Melville's Moby Dick into Japanese emoticons named Emoji. At the time not a lot of people were using Emoji, they had just become available on the iPhone, and I found myself completely obsessed 30 with them and wanted to do something interesting and weird.
So part of the idea was that the act of translating English, particularly well-written symbolic 31 floral English, into Emoji is kind of difficult but also rewarding and challenging. And I realised if I really wanted to do this I could probably hire other people to do this. So I kind of came up with this idea of finding people on the web to translate it for me sentence by sentence basically. And instead of just having one person translate one sentence, I actually had multiple people translate the same sentence.
So Moby Dick has something like 10,000 sentences, I had people translate each sentence three or four times and that created these multiple versions of Emoji Dick. And then I had another set of people vote on which sentence was the most faithful to the English. So it was kind of like the crowd editing the crowd, trying to find the best quality in the dataset without having to do too much work for it. It was both successful and also difficult and challenging.
A lot of people ask me can Emoji replace normal language and can we just communicate if I just go all in Emoji, could that work as a new form of human communication? I think the jury is still out on that one. I'm optimistic that if we try hard we can convey a lot using symbols and representations. But there's a reason we have language, and I think that was part of the interesting and contentious 32 part about the whole project, was that Melville and Moby Dick in particular is known for being this incredible work of literature, and boiling that all down to a symbol seemed wrong in some people's minds. And so I actually got a lot of negative press when I first announced the project. There were people who were telling me I shouldn't be doing this and it was wrong and every possible thing in between, that just made me want to do it more.
Antony Funnell: Fred Benenson. And for the record, his Emoji version of Moby Dick has been accepted by the Library of Congress in the United States.
Let's stay with that idea of Emoji becoming a language in itself, and here's leading American linguist 33 Ben Zimmer:
Ben Zimmer: The fact that they've arrested in popularity so quickly suggests to me that there is a kind of a universal appeal that may be long-lasting. And we are in a very early stage with this. We've had emoticons, for instance, for much longer, since the emoticons could be typed out with just a regular keyboard, those date back to the 1980s and have been successful in online communication ever since. Because this is still so new for so many people, there's a lot of experimentation 34 going on. And because there are no rules, people are sort of making up certain rules on the fly. When is it appropriate to use certain kinds of Emoji? When is it appropriate to combine them in certain ways?
And actually we have enough data now that we can start looking for those patterns that people are creating when they combine them, for instance. Certain Emoji go together well, and certain Emoji can only really follow a certain pattern. So, for instance, some of the patterns that we've seen emerging have to do with the Emoji that show a face with a particular emotion of some sort, like smiling or crying and so forth 35. Very often those show up first, and then other Emoji follow upon that one in the way the face sets a particular mood, and then there's an elaboration on that mood with another type of Emoji.
So people are sort of building kind of language-like system, with perhaps a kind of a grammar to it, but we shouldn't yet consider it an actual full-fledged language or some system that can work like a language. It's still rather rudimentary, although there have been some interesting experiments as well in creating kind of a language-like system out of symbols that are inspired by Emoji. So, for instance, there's something called iConji which was started back in 2010, with a particular lexicon 36 of characters, but these characters can actually be inflected. So if you have a small symbol that means 'start', you can actually mark on it whether it's a noun or whether it's a verb. And if it's a verb, what tense it is.
So a system like that could actually lend itself to being more like a language, something that people use to communicate without requiring another linguistic 37 system, and could possibly be used across different communities around the world. That's a kind of a goal that some people have for Emoji, that it could become a real universal system of communication. Whether that actually pans out, well, that remains 38 to be seen. So people are experimenting with it, they are having fun with it, and we will just have to see how it develops and how it grows.
Antony Funnell: People are experimenting with it, they're having fun with it, as you say. There are other people who find Emoji…and they found this with emoticons…they find them unbelievably annoying. Why do people have such a strong set against the use of Emoji? Why does it matter to some people?
Ben Zimmer: Well, I think that seeing these little pictures pop up in communication immediately brings to mind for some people the idea that this is something very frivolous 40, that it's nothing more than something that children would do when they are drawing little pictures or doodling and that sort of thing. And so it has an immediate 39 effect on some people as seeming as something that is not worthy 41 of any type of serious communication. And it's true for the most part that playfulness is a really important aspect of it.
So people might think of it as a kind of dumbing-down of communication, that it seems to be that you use these pictures because you can't express what you want to say in written words. Now, I think that people who use Emoji are perfectly 42 capable of expressing things using words, but Emoji represents a different kind of system with a different kind of repertoire 43, you could say, of what's possible and how that can be communicated. It can open up the possibilities beyond just what we can do with words. So we don't have to think of it as something that is going to simply replace written language, but it can always be something that will supplement it or complement 44 it in a playful way. Or people may find more serious uses for it eventually. But for now it's an aspect of online communication that people can embrace without worrying too much about how serious the consequences of it might be.
Antony Funnell: Ben Zimmer, linguist and executive editor of the website Vocabulary.com. He's also a language columnist 45 for the Wall Street Journal.
Rebecca Lynch: My name is Rebecca Lynch, I am a designer and creative in London and California.
Antony Funnell: And Rebecca is of interest to us today because she's actually one of those trying to take Emoji beyond just its fun and playful persona. She's begun creating her own set of Emoji characters called Introjis, that is Emojis for introverts 46 or people with introverted tendencies.
Rebecca Lynch: There are about 30 different symbols right now. They represent states for doing activities alone, like gaming or reading or listening to music. They also represent different social states that you might find yourself in, such as needing to recharge on a Friday night. My Introji project is more of an experiment than an exercise in good design. It's a way of saying can we use these tools that we have now to make communication a little bit easier for certain kinds of people.
I'm like a lot of introverts, I prefer texting to phone conversations. I think that Emoji can be really helpful in this context because they give you just a little bit of extra…I guess extra information, extra subtlety 47 to a text message, which I think is important to a lot of people and a lot of introverts.
Emojis, as they exist now, don't really have that range of expression for activities that might be interesting to introverts, like reading, being alone, needing to recharge and have alone time. We've had about 8,000 likes on our Facebook page from all over the world. Introji have been featured in about seven different languages. We've got lots of people writing in to say they want to see this or that Introji. A lot of people have said I'd really like one for just me sitting alone with my cat, which is kind of funny, so I'm making that one.
So the feedback has been really helpful in terms of people saying 'we like these, we identify with these, we don't necessarily like those', and I'm really trying to respond to that, because for me it's not about telling people how they should or shouldn't feel or behave or respond, it's meant to be an inclusive project.
What I'm working on right now is the actual development of an app which will let people really easily just copy and paste these little images into their text messages and into their other communications. It is not quite at that stage yet, so it's little bit tricky 48, you have to go onto Facebook and then pick the image. People are doing it that way, but obviously the next step is to get it as a mobile app that can be used more easily.
Antony Funnell: Rebecca Lynch and the Introji Project. There's a link on our website.
You're listening to Future Tense and to the curious and fascinating world of neo-pictographic communication. I'm Antony Funnell.
Lisa Scharoun is a Professor of Graphic 49 Design at the University of Canberra and when it comes to language and Emoji, she takes the long view.
Lisa Scharoun: The cave paintings in Lascaux were some of the most ancient of human communication models that we can find where they were painting bulls and people hunting. So humans have been communicating with pictures for as long as we've been aware of. There's quite a famous language learning tool that has come out that's called Chineasy which shows you how the Chinese characters all evolved from pictures. So Chinese language is quite close to the original picture meanings, whereas, like the Latin alphabet, we've really evolved away from what the original picture meanings were. But yes, original languages like cuneiform or hieroglyphics 50, they are all picture based languages, all of our written language is based on some sort of pictographic meaning at one point.
Antony Funnell: So if you take that historic context, it's not surprising then that Emojis are increasing in popularity as a form of communication.
Lisa Scharoun: Yes, and especially since social media opens up the forum 51 to a global audience, and you don't often have time to translate what someone has said on Facebook or on Twitter, so you can quickly…like, I have friends on my Facebook from all over the world, and sometimes they'll write something and they are not in English where they are from, but if they put up a picture with an Emoji smiley face, I know they are happy. So now social media has opened up this forum where we want to communicate quickly, and sometimes we feel we can't communicate in English if we are from a different country, and you might be communicating to an English-speaking audience. So an Emoji is a way to show that emotional response quickly and you know that other people will be able to understand it and interpret it.
Antony Funnell: And according to Lisa, another factor in the rapid rise of Emoji usage around the world relates not just to the way we communicate, but to the sense of identity we express in our communication, picking up in a sense on what Rebecca Lynch was saying. And on that score, says Professor Scharoun, Emoji fit perfectly with the consumerist nature of modern society.
Lisa Scharoun: So we are highly influenced by brands and by the symbols that represent them. They have much more infused meaning, and so we trust them. We understand that yes, okay, this brand will make my teeth cleaner or it's better for me or it's more natural. So we rely on the visual symbols. Like, for instance, on Facebook I have a lot of friends and they just communicate in Emojis, and that says something about their personality as well, like they are relying on these symbols to represent them all the time. And I guess it relates back to branding, that you often use symbols to represent, you show how you feel to the world or the type of style that you represent to the world. So in that way, yes, Emojis can have that similar translation.
Antony Funnell: And you thought a smiley face was just a smiley face.
So Emoji are about reflecting a bit of ourselves in the messages we send to others. And as we heard way back at the beginning of the program, their usage is booming because they seem to have found their niche 52 in the world of mobile media.
Our final guest today is linguist Tyler Schnoebelen who specialises in language and design. He's the founder and chief data analyst 53 for a San Francisco-based start-up called Idibon.
Tyler Schnoebelen: The last time we calculated it, the number of words sent every three months in SMS messages around the globe equals all of the words ever published in any language in the history of mankind. And so what that means is that you really have this enormous use of these text messages and text formats 54 that you haven't seen before. And these kinds of interpersonal relationships are a huge part of how we are as human beings. So you need to be able to find ways to express yourself better than just using standard spelling and standard grammar allows you to.
Antony Funnell: Those who might be sceptical about the use of Emoji and their value might say that they are a shortcut 55, that they allow people not to actually think about what they are writing and what they are communicating, to cheat in a sense. What would your response be to that?
Tyler Schnoebelen: I think that there are probably a lot of people who would say they have struggled hard and long about which smiley face they were going to include in a message. So I think that it's not a priori for sure that people are using them to get out of thinking about how to craft a message.
Part of what really happens when you're communicating with somebody is you are communicating a bunch of stuff in each linguistic gesture that you make, how you pronounce the words, the intonation 56 that you choose, the speed that you talk at. And you are not really saying people are taking shortcuts 57 by using those differently, and similarly you are not taking a shortcut by a putting in an Emoji. It's part of the package of I'm trying to convey a stance, some meaning, and this is part of what I'm doing to convey that.
It's true that you wouldn't put them in every instance. They are not really about absolute reference, they are really much more about this work of positioning. And in that they seem to do a very good job in that they also seem to have a real role to play to help people express what they are trying to express, and it's not a shortcut at all.
Antony Funnell: There is a comical facet 58 to Emoji and emoticons. They are cartoonish, deliberately 59 so. What does that do for our communication? Does that make them better for certain types of communication than others, and does it make it harder to communicate with Emoji on serious issues?
Tyler Schnoebelen: If you look at how people in social media use punctuation 60 and emoticons, what you'll find is that they are going to use smiley faces and frowning faces with things like 'I love you' and 'I miss you', but obviously you don't put a smiley face or a frowny face with 'f*** you'. You also actually tend to do this thing nowadays where there…there was a hypothesis by a reporter at the New Republic, Ben Crair, and he thought that people were using final periods to say 'I'm pissed off'. And so what that translates to is actually you get a lot more final periods in messages that also include 'f*** you' in them.
And so it's true that when you are really full of rage and wrath 61 you are not likely to include the angry face Emoji, that's a playful Emoji when you are pretending to be angry or you are not really deeply angry. It would be a weird thing to spew off a bunch of vitriol and then end with a bunch of Emoji. That doesn't make sense. Just as you wouldn't use other kinds of language when you are doing that.
And so it is true that the emotional universe of Emoji and emoticons is not the same as the full range of human experiences. And so no, it doesn't seem that Emoji are particularly well-suited for true wrath. They are probably not particularly well suited to real grief. So when you use crying Emoji you may well be missing someone but you're not grief stricken. And so they tend to be especially useful in light situations and making light of situations or politeness situations where you just want to make sure someone understands that you are saying this in a friendly way.
Antony Funnell: Does that then limit their usage, their applicability?
Tyler Schnoebelen: Well, it's just about knowing that there are different words and expressions that go with different kinds of states. It will take a few years before people start using these in a different way where they start using them when they are full of rage or when they are in deep sadness. That's probably just unlikely to happen anytime soon or maybe even ever. But that doesn't limit their utility. Just as the word 'awesome 62' or 'cool' or 'dude', those are useful words. They really do a lot of stuff. They don't do that stuff everywhere in all situations, but that's true of all words. No word is perfect for every context.
I think one of the things we are really seeing is they are spreading through a lot of new social networks. People who didn't use an Emoji at all last year now are. Partly that's because smart phones are more prevalent and so they are easier to use, partly it's because you kind of have to have somebody use one to you before you maybe become aware that they exist as an option that you could use as well, and then they are fun and they sort of take off.
It may well be that as we keep texting more, we are going to need these resources to help express ourselves. It may be that in the further future we have easier ways of communicating with each other through computers where there is more voice stuff going on, maybe there's an earbud in which case I hear your voice talking to me and I don't have to read anything at all, then obviously Emoji will go away. But text affords a whole bunch of conveniences, for synchronicity, for contemplation. So I think that the text revolution is going to continue and I think that as long as people are communicating with each other with texts, they are going to want to be able to ornament 63 and elaborate on what it is they mean by what they are saying.
Antony Funnell: The curious world of the Emoji, they are among us in our phones and devices, in all their shapes and guises 64.
Tyler Schnoebelen was our final guest there, he's a linguist and also the co-founder and chief data analyst for the San Francisco-based start-up Idibon.
We also heard today from: Emoji enthusiast 11 Niki Selken from the World Translation Foundation website; Fred Benenson, the brain behind Emoji Dick, an Emoji translation of Herman Melville's famous whale tale; UK-based Rebecca Lynch, a designer and the creator of Introjis, that's Emojis for introverts; Lisa Scharoun, Professor of Design at the University of Canberra; and finally Ben Zimmer, linguist, executive editor of Vocabulary.com and language columnist for the Wall Street Journal.
Hello, Antony Funnell here, welcome to Future Tense. Today's show is about the astonishing growth in popularity of Emoji, those little weird 1 faces and symbols people increasingly use when communicating on phones and online.
For the sake of brevity, if not complete accuracy, we reckon 1963 might be the year to pick if you're looking for a suitable rough starting date for the Emoji phenomenon. '63 was a big year; John F Kennedy was shot, there was the Profumo scandal in the UK, and The Beatles released their first album, as you can hear.
[Music: The Beatles]
But 1963 also saw the birth of the smiley face; black dots for eyes and an upturned mouth, set in a yellow circle. It was created by a US advertising 2 type and it quickly became an icon 3 of the '60s and '70s.
Fast-forward to 1982 and a computer scientist named Scott Fahlman took the smiley face idea and adapted it for use in the computer world, this time not so much as a universal feel-good symbol, but as a marker to put at the end of a message, so that somebody reading your post could tell when you were not being entirely 4 serious, when you were having a joke. It was basic, but effective; a colon 5, followed by a dash, followed by parenthesis 6 for the mouth. And so the smiley face became the emoticon.
Then (and here's the crucial bit) in the late 1990s a Japanese man named Shigetaka Kurita who worked for a phone company took the simple emoticon and made it really fancy, and since that time Emoji have grown in number, nature and complexity 7.
Niki Selken: My name is Niki Selken, and I am the co-founder 8 of World Translation Foundation or Emoji Foundation. And I like the title Emoji Translator. I founded the site and the organisation 9 with a friend and a collaborator 10 of mine, Cara Rose DeFabio, who also does Emoji work.
Antony Funnell: Niki's World Translation Foundation website is basically a one-stop shop for information about everything to do with Emoji; articles, new research, Emoji-inspired art. You name it.
There are now hundreds and hundreds of official emoji available for use on Apple and Android-powered smart phones, the number is expected to top 1,000 later this year. And then there are lots of unofficial emoji as well, designed by enthusiasts 12 like Niki…well, just for the fun of it.
Niki Selken: You know, I started collecting Japanese stationary 13 when I was in college, with all of the characters, kind of obscure stuff too, not just Hello Kitty, and I really like this idea of how we can translate and mistranslate languages between particularly Japanese and English, and all of the wacky characters. And then when the Emoji were released for the iPhone I got very excited because I realised I could start texting or emailing in a way that felt…I don't know, it just feels more fun and accessible.
And then when I got into grad school I started looking more academically at Emoji and I realised that as the Emoji was rising, so was the amount of people texting and tweeting rather than emailing. And so the way language was shifting into these shorter, more digital communication styles, I think the Emoji became more popular because they could fill in that emotional blank that you were missing when you were just sending, you know, a short tweet or a short text. They actually hit the same part of the brain as a facial expression does, when you use the facial Emojis. So you are sending kind of a smile to a friend, literally 14. Our brains pick it up. And we might smile back when we see it, and to me that's really fascinating.
Antony Funnell: So they've been around for a while, but it's really this move towards mobile technology, the fact that mobile technology has really just taken off in such a massive way in the last couple of years, that has also fed an interest and a usage of Emoji.
Niki Selken: Yes, and it was particularly in 2010 when Apple and Google decided 15, hey, we want to partner with the Unicode foundation, who are the ones that decide what languages get encoded into the web, and they said we want to put Emoji on our platforms on our phones and we want to ratify 16 them as a Unicode language, like a real language and decide which Emojis we accept.
Emojis, unlike emoticons, were invented in Japan, so they are originally Japanese characters that were designed by a Japanese designer. So some of them, we don't always know what they mean, as people not from Japan, we give them our own meanings. But the fact that two of the largest computer phone platform folks were like, hey, this is something we want to put on the phone, made it accessible to everyone. And that's when it changed I think.
Antony Funnell: And it's that subjective 18 nature of the Emoji, that it's a depiction 19, it's a pictorial 20 depiction, but it's open to interpretation 21, isn't it, as you said, it's that subjectivity 22 that you particularly find fascinating, is it?
Niki Selken: Yes, and there's other projects online such as the NounProject which is where they have sort of a curated selection of icons 17 and iconography that is in the same vein 23 of this that designers use all the time when they are designing…you know, you think of bathrooms signs or other kind of road signs or things that describe really quickly what you are looking at. But now we have an entire language set of a ratified 24 Emoji of I think it's 850-something characters that are cross-platform on almost everyone's mobile device that has a smart phone, and that's pretty amazing. Everyone is seeing this and so it has become a language.
Antony Funnell: So is it changing the way people communicate? Some people just use them I guess to enhance the messages that they send, but other people like yourself are using them quite intensively. If you are using them quite intensively, are you modifying the language that you use to meet the Emoji that are there?
Niki Selken: Almost it makes me more thoughtful. So I had a friend who came and visited me recently, went back to San Francisco, and when she left I thought for a while what can I say? Well, I can't say how I feel, I miss her very much, so I sent her like a little Emoji poem of my feelings, of her in New York with the New York Statue of Liberty Emoji, a heart and a plane and the San Francisco Golden Gate Bridge. I tried to create a visual poem of my feelings because I felt like that spoke 25 more and meant more than me just saying 'I'll miss you', which everyone says.
I think that because it activates 27 the right side of our brains, whereas words activate 26 the left, that when we are looking at an Emoji we may be feeling something differently than when we read something, and feeling it in a different way because our brain is processing it differently. So I do think that Emojis…I don't know if it makes us more intimate, but I think it has the potential to make us close in a different way than if we are texting. And it also makes us more thoughtful because it's not innate 28 yet, it's still a new language, so you have to really think about it when you are choosing your Emoji, what you're doing.
As people become more accustomed to them, and that's part of the Emoji Dictionary project, is helping 29 people get more fluent, but I think for now any time you have to be thoughtful about something, it's more meaningful.
Fred Benenson: Hi, my name is Fred Benenson, I run the data team at Kickstarter, I'm based out of New York City. Emoji Dick was a project I made to translate Herman Melville's Moby Dick into Japanese emoticons named Emoji. At the time not a lot of people were using Emoji, they had just become available on the iPhone, and I found myself completely obsessed 30 with them and wanted to do something interesting and weird.
So part of the idea was that the act of translating English, particularly well-written symbolic 31 floral English, into Emoji is kind of difficult but also rewarding and challenging. And I realised if I really wanted to do this I could probably hire other people to do this. So I kind of came up with this idea of finding people on the web to translate it for me sentence by sentence basically. And instead of just having one person translate one sentence, I actually had multiple people translate the same sentence.
So Moby Dick has something like 10,000 sentences, I had people translate each sentence three or four times and that created these multiple versions of Emoji Dick. And then I had another set of people vote on which sentence was the most faithful to the English. So it was kind of like the crowd editing the crowd, trying to find the best quality in the dataset without having to do too much work for it. It was both successful and also difficult and challenging.
A lot of people ask me can Emoji replace normal language and can we just communicate if I just go all in Emoji, could that work as a new form of human communication? I think the jury is still out on that one. I'm optimistic that if we try hard we can convey a lot using symbols and representations. But there's a reason we have language, and I think that was part of the interesting and contentious 32 part about the whole project, was that Melville and Moby Dick in particular is known for being this incredible work of literature, and boiling that all down to a symbol seemed wrong in some people's minds. And so I actually got a lot of negative press when I first announced the project. There were people who were telling me I shouldn't be doing this and it was wrong and every possible thing in between, that just made me want to do it more.
Antony Funnell: Fred Benenson. And for the record, his Emoji version of Moby Dick has been accepted by the Library of Congress in the United States.
Let's stay with that idea of Emoji becoming a language in itself, and here's leading American linguist 33 Ben Zimmer:
Ben Zimmer: The fact that they've arrested in popularity so quickly suggests to me that there is a kind of a universal appeal that may be long-lasting. And we are in a very early stage with this. We've had emoticons, for instance, for much longer, since the emoticons could be typed out with just a regular keyboard, those date back to the 1980s and have been successful in online communication ever since. Because this is still so new for so many people, there's a lot of experimentation 34 going on. And because there are no rules, people are sort of making up certain rules on the fly. When is it appropriate to use certain kinds of Emoji? When is it appropriate to combine them in certain ways?
And actually we have enough data now that we can start looking for those patterns that people are creating when they combine them, for instance. Certain Emoji go together well, and certain Emoji can only really follow a certain pattern. So, for instance, some of the patterns that we've seen emerging have to do with the Emoji that show a face with a particular emotion of some sort, like smiling or crying and so forth 35. Very often those show up first, and then other Emoji follow upon that one in the way the face sets a particular mood, and then there's an elaboration on that mood with another type of Emoji.
So people are sort of building kind of language-like system, with perhaps a kind of a grammar to it, but we shouldn't yet consider it an actual full-fledged language or some system that can work like a language. It's still rather rudimentary, although there have been some interesting experiments as well in creating kind of a language-like system out of symbols that are inspired by Emoji. So, for instance, there's something called iConji which was started back in 2010, with a particular lexicon 36 of characters, but these characters can actually be inflected. So if you have a small symbol that means 'start', you can actually mark on it whether it's a noun or whether it's a verb. And if it's a verb, what tense it is.
So a system like that could actually lend itself to being more like a language, something that people use to communicate without requiring another linguistic 37 system, and could possibly be used across different communities around the world. That's a kind of a goal that some people have for Emoji, that it could become a real universal system of communication. Whether that actually pans out, well, that remains 38 to be seen. So people are experimenting with it, they are having fun with it, and we will just have to see how it develops and how it grows.
Antony Funnell: People are experimenting with it, they're having fun with it, as you say. There are other people who find Emoji…and they found this with emoticons…they find them unbelievably annoying. Why do people have such a strong set against the use of Emoji? Why does it matter to some people?
Ben Zimmer: Well, I think that seeing these little pictures pop up in communication immediately brings to mind for some people the idea that this is something very frivolous 40, that it's nothing more than something that children would do when they are drawing little pictures or doodling and that sort of thing. And so it has an immediate 39 effect on some people as seeming as something that is not worthy 41 of any type of serious communication. And it's true for the most part that playfulness is a really important aspect of it.
So people might think of it as a kind of dumbing-down of communication, that it seems to be that you use these pictures because you can't express what you want to say in written words. Now, I think that people who use Emoji are perfectly 42 capable of expressing things using words, but Emoji represents a different kind of system with a different kind of repertoire 43, you could say, of what's possible and how that can be communicated. It can open up the possibilities beyond just what we can do with words. So we don't have to think of it as something that is going to simply replace written language, but it can always be something that will supplement it or complement 44 it in a playful way. Or people may find more serious uses for it eventually. But for now it's an aspect of online communication that people can embrace without worrying too much about how serious the consequences of it might be.
Antony Funnell: Ben Zimmer, linguist and executive editor of the website Vocabulary.com. He's also a language columnist 45 for the Wall Street Journal.
Rebecca Lynch: My name is Rebecca Lynch, I am a designer and creative in London and California.
Antony Funnell: And Rebecca is of interest to us today because she's actually one of those trying to take Emoji beyond just its fun and playful persona. She's begun creating her own set of Emoji characters called Introjis, that is Emojis for introverts 46 or people with introverted tendencies.
Rebecca Lynch: There are about 30 different symbols right now. They represent states for doing activities alone, like gaming or reading or listening to music. They also represent different social states that you might find yourself in, such as needing to recharge on a Friday night. My Introji project is more of an experiment than an exercise in good design. It's a way of saying can we use these tools that we have now to make communication a little bit easier for certain kinds of people.
I'm like a lot of introverts, I prefer texting to phone conversations. I think that Emoji can be really helpful in this context because they give you just a little bit of extra…I guess extra information, extra subtlety 47 to a text message, which I think is important to a lot of people and a lot of introverts.
Emojis, as they exist now, don't really have that range of expression for activities that might be interesting to introverts, like reading, being alone, needing to recharge and have alone time. We've had about 8,000 likes on our Facebook page from all over the world. Introji have been featured in about seven different languages. We've got lots of people writing in to say they want to see this or that Introji. A lot of people have said I'd really like one for just me sitting alone with my cat, which is kind of funny, so I'm making that one.
So the feedback has been really helpful in terms of people saying 'we like these, we identify with these, we don't necessarily like those', and I'm really trying to respond to that, because for me it's not about telling people how they should or shouldn't feel or behave or respond, it's meant to be an inclusive project.
What I'm working on right now is the actual development of an app which will let people really easily just copy and paste these little images into their text messages and into their other communications. It is not quite at that stage yet, so it's little bit tricky 48, you have to go onto Facebook and then pick the image. People are doing it that way, but obviously the next step is to get it as a mobile app that can be used more easily.
Antony Funnell: Rebecca Lynch and the Introji Project. There's a link on our website.
You're listening to Future Tense and to the curious and fascinating world of neo-pictographic communication. I'm Antony Funnell.
Lisa Scharoun is a Professor of Graphic 49 Design at the University of Canberra and when it comes to language and Emoji, she takes the long view.
Lisa Scharoun: The cave paintings in Lascaux were some of the most ancient of human communication models that we can find where they were painting bulls and people hunting. So humans have been communicating with pictures for as long as we've been aware of. There's quite a famous language learning tool that has come out that's called Chineasy which shows you how the Chinese characters all evolved from pictures. So Chinese language is quite close to the original picture meanings, whereas, like the Latin alphabet, we've really evolved away from what the original picture meanings were. But yes, original languages like cuneiform or hieroglyphics 50, they are all picture based languages, all of our written language is based on some sort of pictographic meaning at one point.
Antony Funnell: So if you take that historic context, it's not surprising then that Emojis are increasing in popularity as a form of communication.
Lisa Scharoun: Yes, and especially since social media opens up the forum 51 to a global audience, and you don't often have time to translate what someone has said on Facebook or on Twitter, so you can quickly…like, I have friends on my Facebook from all over the world, and sometimes they'll write something and they are not in English where they are from, but if they put up a picture with an Emoji smiley face, I know they are happy. So now social media has opened up this forum where we want to communicate quickly, and sometimes we feel we can't communicate in English if we are from a different country, and you might be communicating to an English-speaking audience. So an Emoji is a way to show that emotional response quickly and you know that other people will be able to understand it and interpret it.
Antony Funnell: And according to Lisa, another factor in the rapid rise of Emoji usage around the world relates not just to the way we communicate, but to the sense of identity we express in our communication, picking up in a sense on what Rebecca Lynch was saying. And on that score, says Professor Scharoun, Emoji fit perfectly with the consumerist nature of modern society.
Lisa Scharoun: So we are highly influenced by brands and by the symbols that represent them. They have much more infused meaning, and so we trust them. We understand that yes, okay, this brand will make my teeth cleaner or it's better for me or it's more natural. So we rely on the visual symbols. Like, for instance, on Facebook I have a lot of friends and they just communicate in Emojis, and that says something about their personality as well, like they are relying on these symbols to represent them all the time. And I guess it relates back to branding, that you often use symbols to represent, you show how you feel to the world or the type of style that you represent to the world. So in that way, yes, Emojis can have that similar translation.
Antony Funnell: And you thought a smiley face was just a smiley face.
So Emoji are about reflecting a bit of ourselves in the messages we send to others. And as we heard way back at the beginning of the program, their usage is booming because they seem to have found their niche 52 in the world of mobile media.
Our final guest today is linguist Tyler Schnoebelen who specialises in language and design. He's the founder and chief data analyst 53 for a San Francisco-based start-up called Idibon.
Tyler Schnoebelen: The last time we calculated it, the number of words sent every three months in SMS messages around the globe equals all of the words ever published in any language in the history of mankind. And so what that means is that you really have this enormous use of these text messages and text formats 54 that you haven't seen before. And these kinds of interpersonal relationships are a huge part of how we are as human beings. So you need to be able to find ways to express yourself better than just using standard spelling and standard grammar allows you to.
Antony Funnell: Those who might be sceptical about the use of Emoji and their value might say that they are a shortcut 55, that they allow people not to actually think about what they are writing and what they are communicating, to cheat in a sense. What would your response be to that?
Tyler Schnoebelen: I think that there are probably a lot of people who would say they have struggled hard and long about which smiley face they were going to include in a message. So I think that it's not a priori for sure that people are using them to get out of thinking about how to craft a message.
Part of what really happens when you're communicating with somebody is you are communicating a bunch of stuff in each linguistic gesture that you make, how you pronounce the words, the intonation 56 that you choose, the speed that you talk at. And you are not really saying people are taking shortcuts 57 by using those differently, and similarly you are not taking a shortcut by a putting in an Emoji. It's part of the package of I'm trying to convey a stance, some meaning, and this is part of what I'm doing to convey that.
It's true that you wouldn't put them in every instance. They are not really about absolute reference, they are really much more about this work of positioning. And in that they seem to do a very good job in that they also seem to have a real role to play to help people express what they are trying to express, and it's not a shortcut at all.
Antony Funnell: There is a comical facet 58 to Emoji and emoticons. They are cartoonish, deliberately 59 so. What does that do for our communication? Does that make them better for certain types of communication than others, and does it make it harder to communicate with Emoji on serious issues?
Tyler Schnoebelen: If you look at how people in social media use punctuation 60 and emoticons, what you'll find is that they are going to use smiley faces and frowning faces with things like 'I love you' and 'I miss you', but obviously you don't put a smiley face or a frowny face with 'f*** you'. You also actually tend to do this thing nowadays where there…there was a hypothesis by a reporter at the New Republic, Ben Crair, and he thought that people were using final periods to say 'I'm pissed off'. And so what that translates to is actually you get a lot more final periods in messages that also include 'f*** you' in them.
And so it's true that when you are really full of rage and wrath 61 you are not likely to include the angry face Emoji, that's a playful Emoji when you are pretending to be angry or you are not really deeply angry. It would be a weird thing to spew off a bunch of vitriol and then end with a bunch of Emoji. That doesn't make sense. Just as you wouldn't use other kinds of language when you are doing that.
And so it is true that the emotional universe of Emoji and emoticons is not the same as the full range of human experiences. And so no, it doesn't seem that Emoji are particularly well-suited for true wrath. They are probably not particularly well suited to real grief. So when you use crying Emoji you may well be missing someone but you're not grief stricken. And so they tend to be especially useful in light situations and making light of situations or politeness situations where you just want to make sure someone understands that you are saying this in a friendly way.
Antony Funnell: Does that then limit their usage, their applicability?
Tyler Schnoebelen: Well, it's just about knowing that there are different words and expressions that go with different kinds of states. It will take a few years before people start using these in a different way where they start using them when they are full of rage or when they are in deep sadness. That's probably just unlikely to happen anytime soon or maybe even ever. But that doesn't limit their utility. Just as the word 'awesome 62' or 'cool' or 'dude', those are useful words. They really do a lot of stuff. They don't do that stuff everywhere in all situations, but that's true of all words. No word is perfect for every context.
I think one of the things we are really seeing is they are spreading through a lot of new social networks. People who didn't use an Emoji at all last year now are. Partly that's because smart phones are more prevalent and so they are easier to use, partly it's because you kind of have to have somebody use one to you before you maybe become aware that they exist as an option that you could use as well, and then they are fun and they sort of take off.
It may well be that as we keep texting more, we are going to need these resources to help express ourselves. It may be that in the further future we have easier ways of communicating with each other through computers where there is more voice stuff going on, maybe there's an earbud in which case I hear your voice talking to me and I don't have to read anything at all, then obviously Emoji will go away. But text affords a whole bunch of conveniences, for synchronicity, for contemplation. So I think that the text revolution is going to continue and I think that as long as people are communicating with each other with texts, they are going to want to be able to ornament 63 and elaborate on what it is they mean by what they are saying.
Antony Funnell: The curious world of the Emoji, they are among us in our phones and devices, in all their shapes and guises 64.
Tyler Schnoebelen was our final guest there, he's a linguist and also the co-founder and chief data analyst for the San Francisco-based start-up Idibon.
We also heard today from: Emoji enthusiast 11 Niki Selken from the World Translation Foundation website; Fred Benenson, the brain behind Emoji Dick, an Emoji translation of Herman Melville's famous whale tale; UK-based Rebecca Lynch, a designer and the creator of Introjis, that's Emojis for introverts; Lisa Scharoun, Professor of Design at the University of Canberra; and finally Ben Zimmer, linguist, executive editor of Vocabulary.com and language columnist for the Wall Street Journal.
1 weird
adj.古怪的,离奇的;怪诞的,神秘而可怕的
- From his weird behaviour,he seems a bit of an oddity.从他不寻常的行为看来,他好像有点怪。
- His weird clothes really gas me.他的怪衣裳简直笑死人。
2 advertising
n.广告业;广告活动 a.广告的;广告业务的
- Can you give me any advice on getting into advertising? 你能指点我如何涉足广告业吗?
- The advertising campaign is aimed primarily at young people. 这个广告宣传运动主要是针对年轻人的。
3 icon
n.偶像,崇拜的对象,画像
- They found an icon in the monastery.他们在修道院中发现了一个圣像。
- Click on this icon to align or justify text.点击这个图标使文本排齐。
4 entirely
ad.全部地,完整地;完全地,彻底地
- The fire was entirely caused by their neglect of duty. 那场火灾完全是由于他们失职而引起的。
- His life was entirely given up to the educational work. 他的一生统统献给了教育工作。
5 colon
n.冒号,结肠,直肠
- Here,too,the colon must be followed by a dash.这里也是一样,应当在冒号后加破折号。
- The colon is the locus of a large concentration of bacteria.结肠是大浓度的细菌所在地。
6 parenthesis
n.圆括号,插入语,插曲,间歇,停歇
- There is no space between the function name and the parenthesis.函数名与括号之间没有空格。
- In this expression,we do not need a multiplication sign or parenthesis.这个表达式中,我们不需要乘号或括号。
7 complexity
n.复杂(性),复杂的事物
- Only now did he understand the full complexity of the problem.直到现在他才明白这一问题的全部复杂性。
- The complexity of the road map puzzled me.错综复杂的公路图把我搞糊涂了。
8 Founder
n.创始者,缔造者
- He was extolled as the founder of their Florentine school.他被称颂为佛罗伦萨画派的鼻祖。
- According to the old tradition,Romulus was the founder of Rome.按照古老的传说,罗穆卢斯是古罗马的建国者。
9 organisation
n.组织,安排,团体,有机休
- The method of his organisation work is worth commending.他的组织工作的方法值得称道。
- His application for membership of the organisation was rejected.他想要加入该组织的申请遭到了拒绝。
10 collaborator
n.合作者,协作者
- I need a collaborator to help me. 我需要个人跟我合作,帮我的忙。
- His collaborator, Hooke, was of a different opinion. 他的合作者霍克持有不同的看法。
11 enthusiast
n.热心人,热衷者
- He is an enthusiast about politics.他是个热衷于政治的人。
- He was an enthusiast and loved to evoke enthusiasm in others.他是一个激情昂扬的人,也热中于唤起他人心中的激情。
12 enthusiasts
n.热心人,热衷者( enthusiast的名词复数 )
- A group of enthusiasts have undertaken the reconstruction of a steam locomotive. 一群火车迷已担负起重造蒸汽机车的任务。 来自《简明英汉词典》
- Now a group of enthusiasts are going to have the plane restored. 一群热心人计划修复这架飞机。 来自新概念英语第二册
13 stationary
adj.固定的,静止不动的
- A stationary object is easy to be aimed at.一个静止不动的物体是容易瞄准的。
- Wait until the bus is stationary before you get off.你要等公共汽车停稳了再下车。
14 literally
adv.照字面意义,逐字地;确实
- He translated the passage literally.他逐字逐句地翻译这段文字。
- Sometimes she would not sit down till she was literally faint.有时候,她不走到真正要昏厥了,决不肯坐下来。
15 decided
adj.决定了的,坚决的;明显的,明确的
- This gave them a decided advantage over their opponents.这使他们比对手具有明显的优势。
- There is a decided difference between British and Chinese way of greeting.英国人和中国人打招呼的方式有很明显的区别。
16 ratify
v.批准,认可,追认
- The heads of two governments met to ratify the peace treaty.两国政府首脑会晤批准和平条约。
- The agreement have to be ratify by the board.该协议必须由董事会批准。
17 icons
n.偶像( icon的名词复数 );(计算机屏幕上表示命令、程序的)符号,图像
- Distinguish important text items in lists with graphic icons. 用图标来区分重要的文本项。 来自About Face 3交互设计精髓
- Daemonic icons should only be employed persistently if they provide continuous, useful status information. 只有会连续地提供有用状态信息的情况下,后台应用程序才应该一直使用图标。 来自About Face 3交互设计精髓
18 subjective
a.主观(上)的,个人的
- The way they interpreted their past was highly subjective. 他们解释其过去的方式太主观。
- A literary critic should not be too subjective in his approach. 文学评论家的看法不应太主观。
19 depiction
n.描述
- Double rhythms, resounding through the lyric depiction and connecting with each other, indicate the thespian place of mankind and the cognition of the writer to this thespian place. 这双重旋律互为表里,表明了人类的某种悲剧性处境以及作家对这种悲剧性处境的感受和认识。
- A realistic depiction of scenes from everyday domestic life. 日常家居生活的写实画。
20 pictorial
adj.绘画的;图片的;n.画报
- The had insisted on a full pictorial coverage of the event.他们坚持要对那一事件做详尽的图片报道。
- China Pictorial usually sells out soon after it hits the stands.《人民画报》往往一到报摊就销售一空。
21 interpretation
n.解释,说明,描述;艺术处理
- His statement admits of one interpretation only.他的话只有一种解释。
- Analysis and interpretation is a very personal thing.分析与说明是个很主观的事情。
22 subjectivity
n.主观性(主观主义)
- In studying a problem,we must shun subjectivity.研究问题,忌带主观性。
- 'Cause there's a certain amount of subjectivity involved in recreating a face.因为在重建面部的过程中融入了太多的主观因素?
23 vein
n.血管,静脉;叶脉,纹理;情绪;vt.使成脉络
- The girl is not in the vein for singing today.那女孩今天没有心情唱歌。
- The doctor injects glucose into the patient's vein.医生把葡萄糖注射入病人的静脉。
24 ratified
v.批准,签认(合约等)( ratify的过去式和过去分词 )
- The treaty was declared invalid because it had not been ratified. 条约没有得到批准,因此被宣布无效。
- The treaty was ratified by all the member states. 这个条约得到了所有成员国的批准。
25 spoke
n.(车轮的)辐条;轮辐;破坏某人的计划;阻挠某人的行动 v.讲,谈(speak的过去式);说;演说;从某种观点来说
- They sourced the spoke nuts from our company.他们的轮辐螺帽是从我们公司获得的。
- The spokes of a wheel are the bars that connect the outer ring to the centre.辐条是轮子上连接外圈与中心的条棒。
26 activate
vt.使活动起来,使开始起作用
- We must activate the youth to study.我们要激励青年去学习。
- These push buttons can activate the elevator.这些按钮能启动电梯。
27 activates
使活动,起动,触发( activate的第三人称单数 )
- Activates the window and displays it in its current size and position. 激活窗口,保持当前的大小及位置不变。
- Pulling out the alarm switch activates alarm and pushing it deactivates it. 闹钟的开和关是通过拔出和按入闹铃开关实现的。
28 innate
adj.天生的,固有的,天赋的
- You obviously have an innate talent for music.你显然有天生的音乐才能。
- Correct ideas are not innate in the mind.人的正确思想不是自己头脑中固有的。
29 helping
n.食物的一份&adj.帮助人的,辅助的
- The poor children regularly pony up for a second helping of my hamburger. 那些可怜的孩子们总是要求我把我的汉堡包再给他们一份。
- By doing this, they may at times be helping to restore competition. 这样一来, 他在某些时候,有助于竞争的加强。
30 obsessed
adj.心神不宁的,鬼迷心窍的,沉迷的
- He's obsessed by computers. 他迷上了电脑。
- The fear of death obsessed him throughout his old life. 他晚年一直受着死亡恐惧的困扰。
31 symbolic
adj.象征性的,符号的,象征主义的
- It is symbolic of the fighting spirit of modern womanhood.它象征着现代妇女的战斗精神。
- The Christian ceremony of baptism is a symbolic act.基督教的洗礼仪式是一种象征性的做法。
32 contentious
adj.好辩的,善争吵的
- She was really not of the contentious fighting sort.她委实不是好吵好闹的人。
- Since then they have tended to steer clear of contentious issues.从那时起,他们总想方设法避开有争议的问题。
33 linguist
n.语言学家;精通数种外国语言者
- I used to be a linguist till I become a writer.过去我是个语言学家,后来成了作家。
- Professor Cui has a high reputation as a linguist.崔教授作为语言学家名声很高。
34 experimentation
n.实验,试验,实验法
- Many people object to experimentation on animals.许多人反对用动物做实验。
- Study and analysis are likely to be far cheaper than experimentation.研究和分析的费用可能要比实验少得多。
35 forth
adv.向前;向外,往外
- The wind moved the trees gently back and forth.风吹得树轻轻地来回摇晃。
- He gave forth a series of works in rapid succession.他很快连续发表了一系列的作品。
36 lexicon
n.字典,专门词汇
- Chocolate equals sin in most people's lexicon.巧克力在大多数人的字典里等同于罪恶。
- Silent earthquakes are only just beginning to enter the public lexicon.无声地震才刚开始要成为众所周知的语汇。
37 linguistic
adj.语言的,语言学的
- She is pursuing her linguistic researches.她在从事语言学的研究。
- The ability to write is a supreme test of linguistic competence.写作能力是对语言能力的最高形式的测试。
38 remains
n.剩余物,残留物;遗体,遗迹
- He ate the remains of food hungrily.他狼吞虎咽地吃剩余的食物。
- The remains of the meal were fed to the dog.残羹剩饭喂狗了。
39 immediate
adj.立即的;直接的,最接近的;紧靠的
- His immediate neighbours felt it their duty to call.他的近邻认为他们有责任去拜访。
- We declared ourselves for the immediate convocation of the meeting.我们主张立即召开这个会议。
40 frivolous
adj.轻薄的;轻率的
- This is a frivolous way of attacking the problem.这是一种轻率敷衍的处理问题的方式。
- He spent a lot of his money on frivolous things.他在一些无聊的事上花了好多钱。
41 worthy
adj.(of)值得的,配得上的;有价值的
- I did not esteem him to be worthy of trust.我认为他不值得信赖。
- There occurred nothing that was worthy to be mentioned.没有值得一提的事发生。
42 perfectly
adv.完美地,无可非议地,彻底地
- The witnesses were each perfectly certain of what they said.证人们个个对自己所说的话十分肯定。
- Everything that we're doing is all perfectly above board.我们做的每件事情都是光明正大的。
43 repertoire
n.(准备好演出的)节目,保留剧目;(计算机的)指令表,指令系统, <美>(某个人的)全部技能;清单,指令表
- There is an extensive repertoire of music written for the flute.有很多供长笛演奏的曲目。
- He has added considerably to his piano repertoire.他的钢琴演奏曲目大大增加了。
44 complement
n.补足物,船上的定员;补语;vt.补充,补足
- The two suggestions complement each other.这两条建议相互补充。
- They oppose each other also complement each other.它们相辅相成。
45 columnist
n.专栏作家
- The host was interviewing a local columnist.节目主持人正在同一位当地的专栏作家交谈。
- She's a columnist for USA Today.她是《今日美国报》的专栏作家。
46 introverts
性格内向的人( introvert的名词复数 )
- Extroverts tend to lack self-discipline while introverts lack courage. 性格外向的人缺乏自我约束力,而性格内向的人则缺乏勇气。
- I an introvert and introverts get drawn in. 我是个内向的人而且内向是天生的。
47 subtlety
n.微妙,敏锐,精巧;微妙之处,细微的区别
- He has shown enormous strength,great intelligence and great subtlety.他表现出充沛的精力、极大的智慧和高度的灵活性。
- The subtlety of his remarks was unnoticed by most of his audience.大多数听众都没有觉察到他讲话的微妙之处。
48 tricky
adj.狡猾的,奸诈的;(工作等)棘手的,微妙的
- I'm in a rather tricky position.Can you help me out?我的处境很棘手,你能帮我吗?
- He avoided this tricky question and talked in generalities.他回避了这个非常微妙的问题,只做了个笼统的表述。
49 graphic
adj.生动的,形象的,绘画的,文字的,图表的
- The book gave a graphic description of the war.这本书生动地描述了战争的情况。
- Distinguish important text items in lists with graphic icons.用图标来区分重要的文本项。
50 hieroglyphics
n.pl.象形文字
- Hieroglyphics are carved into the walls of the temple. 寺庙的墙壁上刻着象形文字。
- His writing is so bad it just looks like hieroglyphics to me. 他写的糟透了,对我来说就像天书一样。
51 forum
n.论坛,讨论会
- They're holding a forum on new ways of teaching history.他们正在举行历史教学讨论会。
- The organisation would provide a forum where problems could be discussed.这个组织将提供一个可以讨论问题的平台。
52 niche
n.壁龛;合适的职务(环境、位置等)
- Madeleine placed it carefully in the rocky niche. 玛德琳小心翼翼地把它放在岩石壁龛里。
- The really talented among women would always make their own niche.妇女中真正有才能的人总是各得其所。
53 analyst
n.分析家,化验员;心理分析学家
- What can you contribute to the position of a market analyst?你有什么技能可有助于市场分析员的职务?
- The analyst is required to interpolate values between standards.分析人员需要在这些标准中插入一些值。
54 formats
n.(出版物的)版式( format的名词复数 );[电视]电视节目的总安排(或计划)
- They are producing books in all kinds of different formats. 他们出版各种不同开本的书籍。 来自《简明英汉词典》
- A true GUI includes standard formats for representing text and graphics. 真正的图形用户界面包括表示文字和图形的标准格式。 来自互联网
55 shortcut
n.近路,捷径
- He was always looking for a shortcut to fame and fortune.他总是在找成名发财的捷径。
- If you take the shortcut,it will be two li closer.走抄道去要近2里路。
56 intonation
n.语调,声调;发声
- The teacher checks for pronunciation and intonation.老师在检查发音和语调。
- Questions are spoken with a rising intonation.疑问句是以升调说出来的。
57 shortcuts
n.捷径( shortcut的名词复数 );近路;快捷办法;被切短的东西(尤指烟草)
- In other words, experts want shortcuts to everything. 换句话说,专家需要所有的快捷方式。 来自About Face 3交互设计精髓
- Offer shortcuts from the Help menu. 在帮助菜单中提供快捷方式。 来自About Face 3交互设计精髓
58 facet
n.(问题等的)一个方面;(多面体的)面
- He has perfected himself in every facet of his job.他已使自己对工作的各个方面都得心应手。
- Every facet of college life is fascinating.大学生活的每个方面都令人兴奋。
59 deliberately
adv.审慎地;蓄意地;故意地
- The girl gave the show away deliberately.女孩故意泄露秘密。
- They deliberately shifted off the argument.他们故意回避这个论点。
60 punctuation
n.标点符号,标点法
- My son's punctuation is terrible.我儿子的标点符号很糟糕。
- A piece of writing without any punctuation is difficult to understand.一篇没有任何标点符号的文章是很难懂的。
61 wrath
n.愤怒,愤慨,暴怒
- His silence marked his wrath. 他的沉默表明了他的愤怒。
- The wrath of the people is now aroused. 人们被激怒了。
62 awesome
adj.令人惊叹的,难得吓人的,很好的
- The church in Ireland has always exercised an awesome power.爱尔兰的教堂一直掌握着令人敬畏的权力。
- That new white convertible is totally awesome.那辆新的白色折篷汽车简直棒极了.