Please cool it off a bit or take it to private message. This is not an official warning.
I’d like to add my mustard to the discussion… “my 2 cents” that is, in a less direct translation of the idiom. Btw: did you know how many German idioms are made with “Wurst” ? A lot! But I disgress… back to emojis.
I started out with smileys and I admit when I first encountered emojis I was like “Why on earth would you replace our nice ascii faces with something colorful that will just translate into gibberish when the mail client at the other end doesn’t support those stupid things?”
But as I moved from eMail towards messengers as my primary mode of written one-on-one communication with friends and family, I got used to the colorful things… although I still mostly use those that I have an ascii shorthand for like: 
and 
and 
and 
As more and more of my less nerdy friends and family members have meandered into the digital realm, I’ve noticed some things about how each of them use emojis.
- A friend of mine always uses
to signify that she is laughing, and it has started to spread into other friend’s emoji vocabulary from her… but whenever I see that one I have to think of how it fits with the way she laughs. - My dad is nearly 76 years old and has taken to messengers like a fish to water. The whole family is laughing when he sends messages like this:
and I have no idea how long it takes him to write these. With messengers offering automatic replacement of words probably not that long. - I know that I will always put so many smiley faces in any of my written messages, even on this forum, that I will sometimes go back and erase a few.
- My friend in the US who I’ve had a (mostly written) friendship with since we met in the 90s is using emojis to signify emotions she will not put into so many words. One of her favorites:
I think what I am trying to say with these anecdotes is that I believe use of emojis is highly personal and which ones we use and how we use them becomes part of our “written persona” or part of how we communicate within a group. Just like all language this means that we can be more at ease when communicating with those close to us, with friends who know what we mean with a specific emoji. But when communicating professionally or with strangers use of emoji becomes fraught with possibilities for misunderstandings. And whatever that official description says, an emoji may have acquired a different meaning depending on context. So I’d say emojis have made some things easier by providing more options for short-hand and some things harder because no number of smiley’s can magically make a message be “nice”.
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I think I want to make two general points:
-
Nothing I have said is intended as an argument that emoji, as such, are bad or inferior. It’s intended only as an argument against the apparent suggestion (in the post I first responded to) that text is bad or inferior or lacks expressive capability. (Please note the word “apparent”: If that’s not actually what you wanted to suggest, which I believe you have been saying, then I don’t think we actually disagree.)
-
In particular, while my work as a copy editor often involves imposing standard styles and usages, my basic outlook on language is different: I consider good use of language to be use that expresses the writer’s thought and feelings.
Everything else I have said, and what I originally said at the start of this thread, was reflections on my personal difficulties in understanding and using emoji. It’s not intended as a general theory of anything, or a general standard of value for anyone.
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Anecdote: I kept wondering why people emailing me at work kept ending emails with a J, until I realised that J is a smiley face in Wingdings, and it was Outlook’s bizarre attempt to insert a smiley.
I send my friend a 
often enough when I say good night, that if I send one any other time, she gets the urge to say good night 
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I was pondering this thread last night while working through some chores and made a realization:
When I use text to express my thoughts in a casual way, I often fail to fully convey the nuance of what I mean.
Conversely, when taking extra care in an attempt to better render my thoughts, it comes off as insincere and cold (and, honestly, never as nuanced as I feel is needed)
These are both likely a symptom of me not having a great grasp on the language - and emojis are certainly a crutch in this case, but it’s a crutch that works (well, okay, a crutch that didn’t work would just be some pieces of wood); they allow me to convey a small amount of the otherwise animated body language I would naturally use when talking.
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I find that increasingly I respond to complex situations by saying ‘cool’ and nodding. Is that a standard response or am I just channeling the simplistic communication made easier by emojis?
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In my own thinking more about this, I’ve had an idea about my own peculiar reactions:
If I’m reading something attentively—not just scanning for some particular sentence or bit of information—then I don’t do text => ideas; I do text => voice => ideas. The choice of words, the order of the words, and the use of punctuation all give me hints as to how voice is meant to sound. I more or less reflexively think in terms of reading a passage aloud. But if I run across, say, the sequence colon, hyphen, right parenthesis, there is no way, within the normal conventions of printed English, to read that aloud. I can pause and think the series of names of punctuation marks I just stated, but at best that really slows me down, and in any case it doesn’t convey the meaning. Or I can look at them sideways, which also slows me down, and then try to puzzle out what those marks are meant to represent iconically—but I’m really bad at that. And in any case the change out of “listening” to the sound of the writer’s “voice” to a different mode is jarring. It’s easier just to have my eye skip past, not bringing them into focus, rather than doing all that extra work.
And, well, let’s say that I had an outlook on such things long established by the time emoji (as distinct from emoticons) showed up. But I don’t know how to turn emoji into voice, either, and that’s what I reflexively start doing when I see print/text. So again, for me, they’re sand in the gears. Or, in your metaphor, for me they’re a crutch that doesn’t work.
I’m not good at figuring out people’s body language or facial expressions, either.
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Aha, interesting. Because when I’m mulling over something that’s not directly about language (a bit of maths, say, or the algorithm design I’ve just been fiddling with) I manipulate it in what feels to me like a system of internal symbols, which have no pronunciations or shapes, just meanings. Once I get the things into the right relationships, I have to translate the structure into English (or computer code or whatever) in order to write it down.
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Yep. When I’m decoding I need to give symbols names so I can verbalise my thinking.
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I have internal monologue (some people don’t!) but I’m capable of intermixing English-language internal monologue alongside abstract patterns, sequences and concepts; that’s not to say I have a visual representation alongside a narrative. When I say patterns, I don’t mean a visualization of a pattern but rather the concept and understanding of a pattern. I actually struggle to visualize things mentally- only really beginning to do it for the purposes of problem-solving sometime in my 20s. I am categorically bad at remembering visual information.
So, with all that as a foundation, I’ll bring it back around: the reason I sometimes struggle to convey my thoughts in words (be it text or speech), is that when it comes time to render my thoughts into these media, I want to default into “stream of consciousness mode” which brings me to an abrupt stop when I encounter an abstract thought instead of an English word in said stream (type mismatch error, of course).
And these abstract concepts can be unendingly nuanced in detail in my brain, yet are processed and dealt with mentally as easily as a simple word; when it comes time to render them into text, that’s when I find myself either trying to find a shortcut (usually with an analogy or a metaphor) or having to backtrack to lay down some supporting structure around the concept so that it can then be referenced in the ensuing text (you may notice the first two paragraphs of this post… the structure is not an accident).
The good news, however, is that when asked to do technical writing (as is common in my particular career path), it’s easy to do because the type of technical writing required is typically heavily structured around ante-ceded terminology or process referenced repeatedly - building a foundation of simple concepts that can then be recombined or repeated as necessary to achieve the intended message: it’s literally using the English language to program human behavior… and I’m extremely good at it due to how my brain works.
Unfortunately, in a social/casual setting such as this, there’s very little value in me trying to prescribe your actions. So I just flounder and make jokes, instead.
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Most of that is true of me. Even my dreams are as likely to have abstract knowledge that something is in some location as to have an actual location. I still don’t visualize things mentally; my “spatial” thinking is kinesthetic rather than visual.
In a different domain, I don’t think I have internal monologue. I do think words sometimes, but it’s a conscious choice when I’m trying to work out what to write or say, as now, or when I’m performing a series of actions; my brain doesn’t spontaneously narrate things in words, which I think is what people who talk about “internal monologue” are referring to.
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I do have internal monologues sometimes, on special occasions, when I am trying to make myself remember something, or evaluating the pros and cons of something, or planning a sequence of actions, but those are rare. I don’t think people do most of the time, but obviously everybody is different.
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I think I would have to say that I’m not 100% sure what “interior monologue” is.
On one hand, I consciously think words to myself if I’m working on learning a poem or a song lyric, repeating it over and over till I have it down; or if I’m figuring out opening remarks for a panel discussion, or sometimes if I’m writing some sort document (such as this one, for example); and sometimes I think things to myself like “Now, let’s see” if I’m performing a series of actions. In all of those cases it feels as if “I” am speaking, silently. And I can imagine someone going about doing that all the time, or much of it.
On the other hand, it seems to me as if what I’ve read in some places about interior monologue is a process without that sense of agency, as if there is an interior narrator providing an ongoing description of my experiences and actions, but it is not “I” but, as Freud put it, “it” (or in Latin, id). It’s sort of like what James Joyce gives his viewpoint characters in some chapters of Ulysses, such as Stephen Daedalus walking along the beach and reflecting on Aristotle’s theories of sense perception, or Gerty MacDowell having romantic fantasies about Leopold Bloom. And I don’t think I have that.
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In the context of this thread, I thought it simply meant you “hear” words when you read them.
For those of us that do (most of us) it is nearly impossible to imagine how people who don’t, read. As I understand it, they can read very quickly and entire sentences are assimilated and the meaning derived in one go. I saw a video about someone who does this, but if focused more on the fact that she couldn’t “hear” the words, rather than the more interesting, to me, aspect of how the information contained in text was being processed. Or what goes on when such people write.
But the link provided by pillbox seems to be about something else entirely.
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Yes, it appears I pasted in the wrong Google search result!
It’s an easy enough thing to research at a surface level; I had hoped to find a link to a journal article that a psychologist friend linked in a post on Facebook but I’ve not been able to find it.
I’m still not sure what is meant. Do you have in mind people “hearing” words in a sensory sense, as if they are having auditory hallucinations? Because I don’t do that at all. But I do have a clear conceptual understanding of the phonetics of a sentence as I read it, if i’m actually reading and not just scanning the high points. And I think about the phonetic structure of a sentence.
Or if I’m particularly interested, I may actually pronounce the words, as an intentional action. But at that point it’s not “interior” any more.
But do you think what I do is “interior monologue” in the sense you understood?
The alternative way of reading that I have heard described is so alien to me I’m not sure how it works, and the way I read is so instinctive and natural that I am unable to describe it well.
No, I don’t mean auditory hallucination. No, I don’t mean pronouncing the words. I guess that if you are aware of the phonetic structure, reading left to right, you are reading the same way I am, but I cannot say for sure.
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Let me describe a related distinction. I’ve discussed writing several times with a multiply published novelist whom I know on livejournal. What she says about her writing process is that the “writes” a story by seeing a kind of movie in her head, and frantically scribbling or typing descriptions of the scenes as they play out. And when she goes back to revise, it’s actually hard for her to focus on the words and think about what they say, because reading them starts the internal movie up again.
Now when I write—nonfiction, but it was true back when I was trying to write fiction—in the first place, there is no internal movie. But in the second place, there is no “story” or “essay” or “argument” before I put down the words.The specific words that I choose may utterly change the substance of what I’m writing. It’s like a passage in one of Tolkien’s letters, where he quotes something Theoden says to Gandalf, and says that of course he could restate it, not in Theoden’s archaic English, but in modern English—and he proceeds to do so, right up to the final words, where he says that there is no way Theoden can say anything equivalent in modern English, and that saying the different something that would follow on would make him a different character entirely.
I heard about this first at the first Mythopoeic Conference I attended, where Paul Edwin Zimmer talked about two different kinds of novelists: Those to whom a novel is a kind of movie being described in prose, and those to whom it’s language and writing is shaping language. And I’m totally the second type of writer. I can read works by the other type—the woman I know on livejournal is one such, and I enjoy much of her work—but their creative process is alien to me.
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Let me ask this: if you read an interview of an actor or actress, one who you are familiar with, do you imagine the words in that person’s voice? Or when reading a book, do you generate different sounding voices for the characters when you read their bits of dialogue? In my mind, that would be part of the “hearing” words as you read them.
I also have sort of the inverse, where when listening to a podcast or radio, and someone who I have never seen before is talking, I get a mental image of the person, even though it may not look a thing like the person does in real life, their voice evokes that picture for me.
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It’s hard to say, because on one hand I rarely read interviews, and even more rarely with actors or actresses, who don’t often interest me; and on the other hand I don’t have much sense of what they look or sound like. I suppose an analog might be T.S. Eliot, as I know by heart some of his poems (the ones in Old Possum) and passages from others (particularly “Prufrock” and “The Waste Land”) and I have listened to recordings of him reading his verse. I do have a strong sense of the rhythm and accent of his readings, and that has gotten into how I read them, but I don’t feel confident that I would recognize the sound of his voice if I heard a recorded interview or if he could magically call me on the phone.
As to mental images, I don’t have much in the way of mental imagery of anything.