Sad Cowboy Emoji

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About

Sad Cowboy Emoji, also referred to as "Sad Yeehaw" or "Sad Howdy Boy," is a photoshopped emoji mashup, combining the emojis "Cowboy Hat Face" and "Pensive Face."

Origin

The earliest known iteration of the Sad Cowboy Emoji was posted by Facebook ^[1] user trashnymph on July 26th, 2017. In the post, the user captioned various photoshopped emojis, including Pouting Face, Thinking Face, Smirking Face, and Pensive Face,^[2] wearing cowboy hats, with "unemployment has gifted me with the free time to build a howdy family." The post (shown below) received more than 15 reactions and 3 shares.

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On August 6th, 2017, in a now deleted tweet (shown below), Twitter^[3] user @Dintrification tweeted, "Tfw u get invited out just to b the third wheel." Under the caption, the user posted an image of the "Cowboy Hat Face" emoji combined with the "Pensive Face" emoji (shown below, left).

Months later, on October 20th, Twitter^[6] user @pienar retweeted a private post by Twitter user @lettucechair tweeted of the emoji with the caption "they always say yee haw they never ask haw yee." The post received more than 100,000 retweets and 259,000 likes in six months.

Later that month, On October 28, 2017, Twitter^[4] user @sivanswift tweeted photos of an in-progress and completed and lit jack o' lantern of Sad Cowboy Emoji. The final post (shown below, center) received more than 10 retweets and 75 likes in six months.

The following year, on March 25th, 2018, Twitter^[5] user @ShlongUziVert posted the emoji with the caption "they always say yeehaw but never ask haw yee." The post (shown below, right) received more than 98,000 retweets and 282,000 likes in four days.

On March 27th, Twitter^[7] user @misandrism tweeted a side-by-side image of a Pensive Face emoji with the Sad Cowboy emoji with the caption "hurt by nin vs hurt by johnny cash." The post (shown below) received more than 15,000 retweets and 52,000 likes in two days.

The following day, Mashable ^[8] published an article about the emoji.