Read: Why white people don’t use white emoji

As a white man whose identity is often the default in emoji, let me say explicitly that increasing diversity in the globe’s favorite pictorial language is a good thing. But all together, emoji are becoming more specific and less flexible as more icons appear. That shift doesn’t just add more choice among emoji; it also changes their semiotic function. Over time, the visual language has shifted away from abstract, ideographic uses and toward specific, illustrative ones.

The original emoji were created for Japanese cellphones by the telecom NTT Docomo in 1999. Those emoji worked as pictograms or ideograms. Pictograms, such as the train or cigarette in the original set, work like international signage—they convey meaning by resembling an object. Ideograms are symbols that represent ideas or concepts rather than objects themselves—a circle with a line through it (🚫) to indicate prohibition, for example. Many emoji are hybrids of ideograms and pictograms. The heart or the snowman, for example, aren’t typically used to depict cardiac organs or winter yard sculptures. Instead, they signal love or coldness, respectively. The 1999 emoji were small and low-resolution, too: 12 pixels square, in a single color. That helped them work like airport signage rather than like avatars.

Pictograms (including ideogrammatic ones) are powerful because they are specific but flexible. The train can represent a light-rail line, a subway, a toy, and so on. A snowman can mean a literal snowman, or a warning that it’s cold out, or even a gripe about the office thermostat. The pleasure, and power, of emoji arises from the ambiguity inherent in picto-ideographic writing.

That power continues with today’s higher-resolution versions. A skull (💀) almost never means that the speaker has a braincase in hand, Hamlet-like, but rather offers an ashen reaction or a lol, I’m dead sentiment. An emoji originally designed to signify an Eastern bow of greeting or politesse (🙇‍♂️) takes on the more abstract meaning of mild subjugation or psychic deflation in the West. Fire (🔥) could mean a campfire or house fire, but more often it suggests enthusiasm, ferocity, or even spice. Eggplant (🍆) could denote a nightshade, but more likely it suggests, well, something else. These and other meanings are possible because the emoji function primarily as ideograms.

But as emoji have become more specific in both their appearance and their meaning, their ideographic flexibility has eroded. Consider two versions of the cocktail emoji pictured below:

The 1999 version mostly bears ideographic meaning. It suggests “cocktail” in the abstract, and you can imagine using it to suggest that it’s time for drinks, or to indicate that you’re waiting at the bar, or to say that you’ve had a few drinks and shouldn’t drive, depending on the context. It works like a sign, not artwork.