💥 🔫 After you're done with this post, check out Part 2.💥 🔫

For the last few years, I've been a coauthor of "Among the New Words," a quarterly article in the journal American Speech. While researching the upside-down smiley face 🙃 for the latest installment, I came across the combination 🙃🔫 .

Having never noticed this combo before, I became curious about what other gun + face emoji pairings were popular, and I took my initial observation to Twitter. Jeremy Burge of Emojipedia mentioned that he saw 😶🔫 (gun + face with no mouth) a lot. Was this a top gun + face emoji pairing?

The short answer is no. The long answer is more involved.

Project Background

First allow me to acknowledge that I know that the "official" unicode name of 🔫 is "pistol." I understand this, and yet, I have never used the word "pistol" to describe this emoji. To me and to so many people, this is the gun emoji. And so, I'll be calling this the gun emoji throughout this post.

I've been slowly teaching myself Python over the last few years, and had downloaded August 2016 tweets from Internet Archive's Twitter grabs with the intention of using them for some sort of project in the future. Now, there are some limitations to using this data to study emoji. First of all, the Unicode Consortium releases new emoji every year, and as new emoji emerge, emoji use necessarily changes. For example, as of June 2017, I'm very fond of the upside-down smiley face 🙃 and the face with no mouth emoji 😶. However, these were only introduced in 2015, so if I were to look at Twitter data from before then, they would obviously not show up in the results. Also, as new emoji are introduced, they take various periods of time to catch on in the mainstream, if they do catch on in any significant way.

Another limitation is that this is Twitter data, and so we can only for certain say that this is an exploration of how Twitter users, in this specific time period, used this emoji. While we can extrapolate this to make assumptions about emoji use at large, those assumptions are not made without reservations.

I also wanted to mention that the gun emoji appears differently on different platforms. On Twitter, where the data from this project comes from, the gun emoji looks like an actual pistol, albeit in adorable emoji form. On any Apple product, the gun emoji appears as a neon green water gun. Could this impact how people feel about the gun emoji, and ultimately how they use it? Of course.