Itsy-Bitsy Teenie-Weenie Yellow Polka-Dot Emoji

I have only recently started using emojis, and I often choose the wrong ones -- the other day, for instance, I meant to send an “astonished” face (😲) and instead sent an “embarrassed” face (😳). Circumstances that would cause me to include something like “cute tiger” (🐯) have thus far eluded me.

So I don’t know when I might want to use the female-swimsuit emoji, but I can still appreciate how exercised Florie Hutchinson of Emojination has become at the sole depiction of this attire, a pink bikini with yellow polka dots shaped for a D-cup bra size (👙). Hutchinson and her co-founder, Jennifer 8. Lee, have proposed to the Unicode Consortium the alternative of a pink maillot in the shape of a normal woman’s body.

We can all imagine the directions this argument might take. If a maillot, why a pink maillot and not black or red? Why not a burkini or a skirted suit? But since this is a language column, I’m more interested in two curious aspects of this kerfuffle. One is the polka-dot bikini itself; the other is the female-slanted language of emoji clothing.

First, to the bikini. Its name originally came from the Bikini Atoll, most famous as a site of nuclear testing in the 1940s -- the idea being that, like the atom bomb, the scanty outfit would be explosive. (My own favorite play on the word comes from Beany and Cecil’s cartoon encounter with “No Bikini Atoll.”) The suit itself was apparently conceived by the French designer Louis Réard, who worked in his mother’s lingerie shop in France during the postwar global textile shortage. The history of swimsuits had mostly been one of modesty. While Esther Williams had worn a two-piece in the 1940s to show off her Olympic-quality abdominal muscles, and Réard convinced a nude dancer to model his four patches of cloth, the bikini remained banned from many public pools and beaches in the U.S. even after (or perhaps because) Brigitte Bardot starred in Manina, the Girl in the Bikini in 1952.

I’m fairly certain that the current emoji swimsuit owes its particular design to Brian Hyland’s 1960s hit “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini,” which is actually about a shy girl who slowly emerges from the locker room and onto the beach, only to seek refuge in the cold ocean, which is where the song leaves her. The yellow polka dots contribute little beyond meter, but polka dots, like bikinis, take their name from an item in the news -- in their case, the 19th-century craze for the polka dance that led manufacturers to add the word polka to just about anything (dotted fabric, for instance) that needed extra marketing.

So much for the polka-dot-bikini emoji that we are apparently stuck with until and unless the Unicode people grant another emoji. As I started to think about this post, though, I wondered what color they had assigned the men’s swimsuit emoji. But for “men’s swimsuit” or “swim trunks,” you get nothing. “Swimwear” brings up the bikini. Finally, frustrated, I searched the emoji dictionary for women’s and men’s clothing. To my perhaps naive astonishment 😲, I found that men’s wear comprises a kimono, jeans, and T-shirt, all of which can be “worn by women or men.” Women exclusively get a blouse, a dress, and the bikini. For shoes, women get a boot, a sandal, a high-heeled shoe, and (recently, thanks to the Emojination women) flat shoes; men get a shoe; both sexes get a running shoe. I strongly suspect that the ballet shoe now being considered for inclusion will be a pink women’s toe shoe. My point being that, so long as we’re expanding the emoji lexicon to include less sexist imagery, let’s open things up on both sides. Give the guys Speedos or trunks, and maybe some sandals that fit their feet. And give us all bow ties, while you’re at it.