Ask a Librarian: Answers You Won't Get From Google: Emojis and More

The volume of Ask a Librarian questions has fallen in the last couple of weeks, but that's OK - we have some good ones this week!

From the blog, an unknown reader asked, "What part of the human face is your favorite?" It all depends on which face we're talking about. Consider the following famous faces:

The "Mona Lisa," a painting by Leonardo da Vinci, has easily the most famous smile in art history:

Granted, the smile involves pretty much the whole face. But I'm sticking with Mona as my favorite smile.

We could certainly consider noses. For my favorite nose, I turn to Cyrano de Bergerac, the hero of a French play by the same name. Cyrano was a terrific guy: witty, generous, good with a sword and he spoke French fluently. The play about him even introduced the word "panache" into English, just to give us a word to describe extravagant confidence.

But his confidence evaporated whenever he tried to talk to women, especially the beautiful Roxanne. Thing is, Cyrano had a rather large nose. As in, a real honker of a nose. A major ski slope of a nose. So he feeds some great lines to his buddy, Christian, who has a regular sized nose but none of Cyrano's panache. At several points, Cyrano whispers lines to Christian while Cyrano is behind a ladder or  hiding in various comic places.

The play is terrific. If we're talking noses, go with Cyrano, as the photo of a stage actor playing the part shows:

But I digress. Noses come in many shapes and sizes, smiles are as various as people, cheeks can be charming, and ears are, well, not all that interesting.

So I will go with eyes. After all, the eyes are the window to the soul, as apparently everyone from Leonardo da Vinci to Shakespeare and beyond has claimed.

Jennah mused, "I wonder how many emojis there are."

Jennah might also wonder what the plural of "emoji" is. That is, should we say, "One emoji, two emoji," or "one emoji, two emojis? "Emoji" is a Japanese word, and apparently, in Japanese, we would say or write "emoji," whether we are talking about one emoji or a hundred emoji. We do the same with sushi. But not, apparently, tsunami.

I investigated thoroughly (as in, for at least five minutes), and found no agreement about the plural of emoji. So I'm going to put an "s" at the end of "emoji" when I am talking about more than one emoji.

Anyway.

I went from mocking Jennah's question, when I first read it, to loving it. For one thing, the answer constantly changes. In July, 2017, for example, there were 2,666 emojis on the official Unicode Standard list. The number has grown a lot since then.

You are probably wondering what the Unicode Standard is. A full explanation is available on the Unicode website, If you are having trouble sleeping, reading the explanation of unicode will send you off to dream land in under a minute. 

The thing to know is that computers just deal with numbers. To deal with letters and anything else, computers need to assign number sequences to them. If all the computer makers and programmers use the same sequences of numbers to refer to letters and other characters, then it is easier to use the internet in the ways it was meant to be used: uploading YouTube cat videos, building incredibly complex Minecraft cities, and spreading conspiracy theories. 

In order for an emoji to become official, it has to be endorsed by Unicode. The most recent count? as of March, 2020, there are 3,304 emojis. Or emoji, if you prefer.

But that's just the official count. I have no doubt that emoji makers are out there right now, designing bootleg emojis for the emoji black market. You can't hold down creativity, folks; emojis will find a way.

Boone asked two questions with no immediately obvious connection: Do you like grapes? Do koalas like coconuts?

I'll take the second question first. No one knows for sure whether koalas like coconuts. There are coconut palms in Australia, but koalas hang out in eucalyptus forests, where they spend a few hours a day eating eucalyptus leaves and the rest of the day looking cute for photographers and sleeping.

Eucalyptus leaves are very fibrous, which means it takes a lot of energy to break down those poisonous leaves into a form of nutrition that won't kill the koalas. If koalas had a more varied diet, perhaps they could work up the energy to climb a palm tree and snag a coconut, or at least find one on the ground and crack it open on a rock. But they're too tired from eating eucalyptus leaves and sleeping all day to work up energy for anything else.

To answer the first question last: Yes.

Another "Unknown" reader asked in a response to a recent post: What is your favorite animal and candy? My favorite animal is the penguin, it will never fly though. . . it is very disappointing. My favorite candy is Charleston chew.

Penguins are fantastic: all that waddling around like tuxedo-wearing party-goers on land and amazingly graceful swimming in the water.

However, owls are my favorite animals: night vision, silent flying, and those wise, wise eyes. Plus, they leave owl pellets, which would be disgusting if they weren't so full of interesting bits of feathers and bones.

I had never heard of a Charleston chew until Unknown's question, and I assumed it was named for Charleston, South Carolina or Charleston, West Virginia, or any one of the 22 US cities named "Charleston." Turns out the candy, which was first manufactured back in 1925, is named for the Charleston dance. The dance is named for Charleston, South Carolina.

Follow the link for a video of people dancing the Charleston, which was a fantastically popular dance nearly 100 years ago.

Here's an idea: Maybe you can convince some teachers to make a Charleston dance video. Or make one of your own! Here's a link to a tutorial.

Oh, my favorite candy: these days, jujy fruit.

Lauren asked, "How many pigs are in the world?"

According to statista.com, a site about which I know nothing, there were 677.6 million pigs in the world as of January, 2020. That's a lot of bacon, folks.

But even if that number is roughly accurate, it doesn't include feral (wild) pigs, potbellied pigs that people keep as pets, the thousands of pig costumes worn for school productions of Charlotte's Web, or the millions of middle school boys who, let's face it, often act like pigs.

These are not good times for pig farmers. The website Pig Progress estimates that the closure of slaughterhouses in many parts of the country could create a backlog of 10 million pigs. If farmers can't get them to market, they will have to be euthanized.

Yes, there really is a website called "Pig Progress." You can read the Pig Progress magazine online if you don't happen to get the paper copy.

The final question comes from a Corvallis Blue Devils Band post on the library's Instagram account (@cms_library_magic): Why do people wear shamrocks on St. Patrick's Day?

All of the sources I checked referred to St. Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland. According to Irish lore, St. Patrick used the three-lobed plant to explain the Christian concept of the trinity. He is also said to have driven all the snakes out of Ireland. I don't know why he felt the need to get rid of all snakes, but maybe he just didn't like them. Personally, I am not a fan of snakes, spiders, or leprechauns, especially as they were portrayed in the Disney movie Darby O'Gill and the Little People.

All I remember from the movie was a spooky scene in a cave lit by creepy green light where the hero of the story was trapped by a lot of leprechauns. It scared me so much as a little kid that for years afterward I slept with the covers pulled up over my head. I was terrified that the green glow and the leprechauns would find me.

For centuries the Irish have regarded the shamrock as its national plant. In 1798, during one of many rebellions that took place during the 700 years that England occupied Ireland, the shamrock became a symbol of national pride. Ireland finally gained independence from England in 1922. Well, most of Ireland. Northern Ireland remained as part of England and suffered decades of guerrilla warfare, bombings, and violence between Protestants and Catholics.

Shamrocks are not native to the United States, so marchers in St. Patrick's Day parades in New York, Boston, and other cities started wearing paper cutouts of shamrocks, along with green clothes. No one knows for sure who first came up with the brilliant idea of making food and drink green, but green frosting, green cereal, and green beverages of any kind are all bad ideas that apparently will continue to survive my disapproval.

Here is the joke of the week posted on Ms. Auch's door last March and still there today, more than two months later:

The answer, of course, is, "Because real rocks are too heavy."