The language of emojis

It’s interesting to watch the devolution, or evolution, of language’s written form from alphabetic, back, or perhaps, forward again, to ideogrammatic.

Of course this is Twitspeak, or perhaps Phonespeak. You can only tap so many thumbs per second. And all those awful letters! And that crazy spelling! And then there’s the character limit!

So we have emojis, or whatever you call them. I suppose these are a single Unicode character, instead of five or ten alphabetic ones. So I get it. But this has rendered much electronic communication quite unintelligible to me, because the vocab has developed so fast. It’s like trying to read the hieroglyphics in some Pharaoh’s tomb, if the priests of Osiris just made it up yesterday, the night before the Pharaoh’s funeral. With a beer or two on the table.

There are a few emojis I know. But others are unfamiliar, and others are ambiguous. What does a big red heart mean? “I love you”? “I feel you”? “I agree with you?”

Of course, pre-emoji language is ambiguous too. “You are sooo right.” Enthusiastic agreement, or sarcasm?

Well, languages evolve, and writing systems do too. One of the advantages of the emojiglyph is that it’s international – doesn’t depend on knowing the phonetics or lexicon or odd orthography of English, or French, or whatever. Or Chinese ideograms, or the bewildering variety of Japanese writing.

I suppose a peach, or an eggplant, means the same thing everywhere, these days.

So I don’t want to be “that guy” who’s always bewailing the actual in favor of some (perhaps imaginary) past. At the same time, progress – let’s say this is progress – also always implies loss.

The loss here, I think, is in a kind of flattening-out. The repertoire of emojis is a good deal smaller than the expressive capacity of any real long-evolved human language.

But then perhaps syntax will raise its immemorial head. Perhaps the order in which you put down the emojis will matter. Does the thumbs-up come after or before the heart? In the latter case, you’ve been dumped, dude.

People will no doubt find a way to communicate, as long as there are people, and they have the physical means of communication. Neither of these assumptions seems as firmly founded as one would like, but let’s hope for the best.

Still, I wonder whether emojiland isn’t a reflex of the contemporary moment of neo-liberal and technocratic globalization. That is, something very specific to our present conjuncture. Everybody in the world knows everybody else, but knows him very shallowly.