It’s amazing how effectively people can communicate with incredibly limited vocabulary. There is clear difference in international dialect even in the use of car horns. Considering that the “speaker”'s only options are duration and frequency of pressing the steering wheel, that’s remarkable. No wonder emojis are so expressive, and also so easy to misunderstand.
I don’t know of an emoji that operates as much like a shibboleth as ‘lol’ does in the world of tlas, but such shibboleths probably exist.
I enjoyed this short tribute to the versatility of from a couple of years ago:
Obviously, sometimes it’s just ‘yes’ or ‘OK’, but very often it does something you can’t easily do with just a few words - it can say, for instance; “I have received your message, I don’t necessarily agree with it, but this conversation is now ended and I’m grateful for your participation’.
I do wonder how Internet users in South America, parts of Africa and the Middle East interpret the ubiquitous thumbs up, given that it’s not really a gesture you want to be using there.
On one hand, yes, I agree with that priority. But on the other hand, being linguistically oriented, I’ve worked very hard to develop the skill of saying such things in words, or at least of using words with nuance and flavor, both in speech and in writing, even though words, too, are fallible, as this very discussion illustrates. And on the gripping hand, when I first encountered emoticons, probably a couple of decades ago, I found it really hard to figure out what facial expression they were meant to represent, or what that signified, and the problem really isn’t helped much by the tiny blobs that emoji mostly come across as here; it’s like the old Peanuts movies where adult speech is represented by a “wanh wanh wanh” sound effect. (I’m not very good at expressions on actual faces, either.)
I have no wish to tell any of you not to use emoji. I’m just letting you know that if you’re trying to communicate with me specifically, via emoji, I probably won’t understand you, and if you use emoji together with words I’ll likely not even look at the emoji in the first place. This is my personal difficulty and if it makes it not worth your while to interact with me you’re under no obligation to do so.
Back in the Mesozoic era when we had amateur press associations, we expressed that sentiment as RAEBNC (usually pronounced “ray-bunk,” with the accent on the first syllable).
Or, well, mostly “we” was other people; if I used acronyms myself it was mostly ironically. But I certainly understood the meaning of “read and enjoyed but no comment.”
Love this. It’s made it to Urban Dictionary, though with just one published definition. Two upvotes and one down, since you ask. Not sure why it got a downvote TBH. Acronyms FTW.
If there were just three police, Whitehall Mystery.
One of the problems with emoji is the restricted set (presumably nothing the mobile phone companies thought would get them negative press). Another problem is cultural significance: if I say do I mean a delicious thing to eat, oh no not shellfish again, Great Cthulhu writ small, or…?
I think what your describing is actually a Pidgin with a very very limited lexicon. This sort of thing has been around for ever and occurs when different groups of people need to communicate. It not a full language it’s just there to get the job done because of something important, normally like trade.
Of the categories that fit I think the best one for emojis is that they are a form of vernacular. By which I mean they are a ‘speech variety used in everyday life by the general population in a geographical or social territory’. It’s just in this case the social territory is actually a bit of the internet. For instance if we all accepted that referrs to a game of Codenames then we are all using the same Vernacular. However another group on another forum could have an entirely different meaning attached. They act something like a pictorial Homonym.
Blimey that got a lot more involved than I meant to get…
and I suspect that it is very over among people who think of things as over.
from a couple of years ago:
do I mean a delicious thing to eat, oh no not shellfish again, Great Cthulhu writ small, or…?
