It’s hard enough to keep up with the latest English terminology and slang surrounding the use of mobes, the UK’s favorite terribly ugly term for mobile phones (mobe is short for mobile phones), but with Keitai terms. phone slang) which now appears in English, we old feys sometimes struggle to understand what it is. This article will try to explain two common and one not so common phrases that seem to circulate in the SNS generation.

Kaomoji

These are literally facial letters, but they are also known as Japanese emoticons. These take not only alphabetic characters, but the full range of symbolic characters, Japanese, Greek, Russian kanji characters, dingbat, and whatever else you can find to create varied horizontal faces. The classic cat emoticon = ^. ^ = This is a simple example, but searching the Internet mysmiley for a term like “kaomoji dictionary” will reveal hundreds, if not thousands, of kaomoji to represent almost any emotion or situation you can imagine. And a good number that could not!

I find it interesting that there are many, many articles about how Western emoticons came about like :-), but very little has been done to reveal the history of Japanese kaomoji. From what I can tell, it was a Korean person in Japan in early 1986 who invented the smiley face (^ _ ^) and a Japanese nuclear scientist who invented (~ _ ~) around the same time.

Emoji

Take a step up the evolutionary ladder and we come to emojis, literally the letters of the image. These were first popularized on Japanese cell phones by displaying a small icon in place of characters in an email. Now almost all phones support a full range of over a hundred of these icons and are a must-have feature for the vast majority of users in Japan, as even if people don’t type them, contacts are likely to send .electronic emails. full of them. ! They also infect Japanese blogs and for many people replace punctuation within the text. Some of the mobile service providers now even animate the glyphs, which brings us to the final end. Decomail

Decomail is actually derived from English, which is short for decorative mail. The decorated mail would be more grammatically correct, but the official full name is indeed a decoration. In fact this should be familiar to many readers as it is just a marketing name for HTML based email on the mobile phone, allowing for simple text decoration through features like scrolling banners, inserted images, aligned text and color selection. An important manifestation of decomail is the use of what is an actually animated emoji, which allows you to insert small animations in emails, and some phones come preloaded with animations numbered in the thousands! However, these images are not just limited to small animated emojis (kaoani – animated faces – are a manifestation, and another term to talk about later) but can also be larger and can also be Flash scripts.

As mentioned at the beginning of this section, decomail is HTML mail, which means yes, you can send these messages to foreign friends right from your Japanese mobile! Sometimes you can get it too, but because the size and other limitations of a cell phone are pretty severe, there’s less guarantee that it will actually work.