Microsoft is reviving the infamous Clippy character as an emoji in Office. After a successful campaign on Twitter and Instagram, Clippy is now replacing all paperclip emojis across MS Windows, MS Office, MS Teams, and other Microsoft 365 products.

I think emojis reflect the times. The values that modern people care about, as well as current trends and events, are all captured in emojis. Therefore, emojis that no longer fit the times get removed, and new ones are added. Shall we look at an example?

Expressions like “crispy” or “crunchy” are indispensable when describing fried food. There are countless food cultures in the world, but fried food exists in almost all of them. You can fry pork, beef, chicken, fish, seafood, and even vegetables like potatoes and eggplant.

The word “emoticon” comes from combining “emotion” and “icon,” referring to symbols that represent emotions. People often confuse emoticons with emojis, but they are actually quite different. Emoticons are made by combining text characters. In contrast, emojis derive from the Japanese term 絵文字 (emoji), where 絵 (え, “e”) means “picture” and 文字 (もじ, “moji”) means “character.” This is why an emoji is treated as a picture that serves as a character.