Emergency Emoji

If – God forbid – I'm ever in some kind of horrific accident 🚑 and end up in the emergency department of a hospital 🏥, I would like it known that I am A-OK 👌 with the staff using emojis to document my condition in their clinical notes 📝. Even if that condition is 💀.

I declare this because I recently saw, via someone who works in the public health service, a directive sent out from the administration of a public hospital to its staff titled 'Professional Documentation – Emojis in the EMR'.

"We've recently become aware of Emojis being entered within clinical notes in the EMR..." the missive read. It went on to use many more words to say that this was ❌.

I find this attitude offensive 😤. What kind of out-of-touch alphabet racist insists the only correct form of written communication is one using standardised letterform characters assembled to form words? What are "words", anyway? They are simply vehicles 🚚 for meaning. It is what we understand by them that matters, and emojis are merely the digital-age 📱continuation of a long-standing practice of adding texture and tone to text ✍️. They are the direct descendants of the emoticons that first evolved when people started chucking colons next to dashes and brackets to convey a smile :-) or a frown :-( or a 8===D~~~. (Google it. Not while you're at work.)

One of the earliest known examples of this practice comes from 1881, when the satirical American magazine Puck published a series of punctuation-mark faces expressing joy, melancholy, indifference and astonishment, as "typographical art".

(Read that sentence again, but this time in the tone I intended it: You can't prohibit these tools!

See? I'm not worked up. I just think it's a laughably ridiculous idea. I am :face-with-tears-of-joy¹: about it.)

Human beings have used visual symbols for millennia to convey meaning, as standalone written language or as part of one. Ancient Egyptians had an entire formal writing system in the form of hieroglyphs, and if 'Man Whose Head is Hit with an Axe'² was good enough to chisel into stone for the Pharaohs, it's good enough for me. The Mesoamerican Indians and the Indus Valley civilisation also had their own unique pictographic systems. (I will concede that none of these linguistic traditions seem to feature an icon for poop³ 💩. An oversight on their part? Or is putting eyes on a pile of excrement proof that society is degenerating? It's an open question.)

Some of the oldest Chinese characters in use today are pictographs – stylised symbols representing physical objects (木 = tree, 目 = eye) – as are a handful of the Japanese Kanji that evolved from them.

It's Japan, incidentally, that we can thank for the modern-day arsenal of electronic emoji. The smiley face family first took up residence in Japanese pagers in the late 1990s. From there, it spread to mobile phones and computers, and over the years spawned many children. The extended family of emojis now numbers in the thousands, featuring flags, fruits, animals, occupations, foods, sports, zodiac signs, clockfaces, different coloured circles, arrows pointing in every direction, a toilet, a piñata, an aerial tramway, and perhaps most upsettingly: the hole of existential dread (🕳️⁴).

Sorry, I need a moment. That hole makes me 😱.

I am now, for legal reasons, going to undermine the entire argument I began with. Emojis should not be adopted in formal settings. Their meaning is too personalised, and therefore ambiguous, and therefore dangerous.

True story: I was once questioned in a court case (one in which I was an extremely minor side character) over my use of emojis in a text message exchange. A colleague had sent me a message which, along with some other smalltalk, mentioned a potential work project. I had replied to the message with nothing but two thumbs up: 👍👍 This, it was being argued by the aggrieved party (not the colleague), was clearly an expression of my enthusiasm and intention to join the potential work project, and proof that I was lying when I said I did not intend this at all.

Except, as I pointed out in my pre-trial response, I routinely use the 👍👍 response to acknowledge receipt of messages. In fact, there were several other examples within the very same text message exchange, where I had responded to messages requiring no affirmative answer with the 👍👍. I had to sign an absurd stat dec explaining that "👍👍" is my personal version of two-way radio lingo's "roger that". It communicated receipt and understanding of the message, not full agreement and action on its content.

(When the lawyers texted me at the 11th hour to say that I would not be required on the stand after all, there was only one way to respond:👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍)

And so: In recalling this bizarre legal episode, I am forced to reconsider my stance on hospital emojis. We can't have nurses and doctors at cross-purposes. One person's IV fluids 💉might be another's morphine 💉, and I do not want to receive saline instead of opioids.

Emojis are for fucking around and for conveying feeling. When the stakes are high, and there's no room for misunderstanding, spelling things out with the boring, standardised, letterform characters I scorned earlier is probably best 😊.

Still. If I am dead – proper dead, no vital signs to be found, stiff-and-blue deceased – feel free to choose from any of the following to make it official on the paperwork:

💀☠️⚰️🪦

(Just please, anything but this one: 🕳️ ).

‍

¹ 😂was the Oxford Dictionary 2015 ‘Word of the Year’. This made a lot of people very 😤. (Do NOT use the 😂emoji if you don’t want to be mocked by Gen Z kids for being old.)

² 𓀑 This was a real Egyptian hieroglyph, by the way, which was used in conjunction with other symbols to create meanings around ‘death’, ‘perish’ and ‘enemy’. It’s not one the hospital staff would most likely need for me. My hieroglyph would probably be ‘lady walking into traffic while staring at her phone’, meaning ‘death, perish, idiot’.

³ There is, however, an alchemical symbol (a notation style used for chemical elements until the 18th century) for ‘horse dung’: 🝖. Does this count as an ‘emoji’? Probably not. Should it be prominently appended to 90% of the news headlines you read? Yes.

⁴ What is this 🕳️supposed to BE!? I don’t like the answers people are offering. Some say it’s a “round, dark, seemingly bottomless pit”. Yuk. Others say it “symbolises a void, gap, or an unexplained or mysterious event”. No thank you! The best case scenario is that it’s for “literal holes in the ground”. I’m no artist, but I’d have put some ground around the contextless hole, if that was what I wanted people to see. Instead, we are faced with an abstract portent of supremely bad vibes. It’s extremely rare for emojis to be ‘retired’, but I urge the powers that be (the Unicode Consortium) to put this soul vacuum in the bin immediately.