When I heard that Oxford Dictionary has decided on
as its word of the year, my first instinct was to look up Oxford Dictionary’s definition of ‘word’. “A single distinct meaningful element of speech or writing, used with others (or sometimes alone) to form a sentence and typically shown with a space on either side when written or printed.” I don’t know about you, but I have, so far, been completely unable to use
in speech. That doesn’t matter, you may point out; the good people who put together the dictionary had specified ‘speech or writing’. Again, I don’t know about you, but even if I allow for :-) or :-(, or ;-) as things you could possibly write,
is not one of them. It’s something you could draw, not really something you can write.
To say
that has thoroughly impressed people at the dictionary company would be an understatement. In a press release that announced
as the appointed ‘word’ of the year, President Casper Grathwohl gushed: “You can see how traditional alphabet scripts have been struggling to meet the rapid-fire, visually focused demands of 21st-century communication. It’s not surprising that a pictographic script like emoji has stepped in to fill those gaps — it’s flexible, immediate, and infuses tone beautifully. As a result emoji are becoming an increasingly rich form of communication, one that transcends linguistic borders.” I have difficulty with each of these sentences. First up, had you noticed the struggle of the traditional alphabet scripts? I hadn’t. The only struggle I noticed was that of a generation of phone users who cannot be bothered to actually use the traditional alphabet scripts. Secondly, how does “emoji infuse tone beautifully”? Isn’t one :-) the same as any other :-)? Can you tell the difference between a sarcastic ;-) and a seductive ;-)? And thirdly, how are emoji becoming an increasingly rich form of communication? Isn’t the whole point of the emoji to shred down language to a standardised emotion, thereby doing exactly the opposite of what Grathwohl says, and stripping it of its inherent richness?
The fact that
is not a proper word is evident even from Oxford Dictionary’s press release. To describe
, one needs real words, comprised of letters and vowels.
, for example, is described as the ‘Face with tears of joy’ (which itself is pretty strange because the way it has been used in my WhatsApp groups seemed to suggest ‘face with tears of mirth’, but hey, let’s not nit-pick). Even with the expanded pack of emoji that seem to cover most needs of daily life, it is still fairly difficult to come up with a combination of emoji that best describe another emoji.
I am no linguistic traditionalist. I watched the evolution of ‘what is up with you’ to ‘whats up’, ‘whassup’ and then ‘‘sup’ with what can only be described as quiet bemusement. The fact that words, sentences and grammar evolve is a given. It is not my case that the adaptation of a picture as a word is necessarily damaging to language. However, it is my theory that
’s appointment as the word of the year is further evidence of how language and, by extension, culture and civilisation are devaluing themselves in order to appeal to the lowest common denominator. What annoys me is that the assumption here is if something has to be popular, the intelligence that is required to understand and interpret it has to be as minimal as possible. Or vice versa.
My 10-year-old borrows my phone sometimes to text her friends. The conversation is predominantly an exchange of emoji, there are hardly any words. It is my hope that she and her friends would eventually evolve to replacing emoji with actual words. The acceptance of
as a word, however, seems to suggest that what is desirable is that adults be reduced to communicating like children. And because the biggest challenge since the discovery of antibiotics is in staying cool, an increasing number of adults are switching to emoji-heavy conversations.
In an essay that Zadie Smith wrote after spending an Oscar weekend in Hollywood, she observed that the swish set there verbalises emotions. If someone joked, they wouldn’t laugh, but would instead say “that’s funny”. The emoji-isation of the world seems, in a way, an opposite extreme. How much longer do we have before they creep into novels? And real life? Would we worry whether our actual laughter is a shade less vociferous an endorsement of a joke than an
is? Would we take cardboard cutouts with us to restaurants and hold them above our heads to indicate what we are feeling? Both culturally and technologically, we are at a place where we cannot rule out these future possibilities. And when that happens, I just hope there is a cave some of us could retreat to and live the rest of our years scribbling words on the walls.
Veena Venugopalis editor BLink and author of The Mother-in-Law