Glancing Askance — No habla emoji

By MARC WOLLIN

As always, when invited to someone's house for dinner, we ask what we can bring. Usually my wife volunteers (after confirming with me) that I would be happy to make a dessert. 

Nine times out of 10 our host takes us up on the offer. And more often than not there are leftovers, which I happily share with all the guests in the interest of not taking it home and stuffing my face.

This time was no different, and the next day I got a nice text back from our host telling me how much he enjoyed what I left behind. 

We exchanged some quick back and forth about the cake and its taste, comparing it to prior efforts. He ended with a yellow smiley face that had a tongue sticking out. Was he licking the plate? Was he making fun of me? Was he riffing on an earlier comment? I queried him on his meaning, as not only am I not good with foreign languages, I am functionally illiterate when it comes to emojis. 

To be fair, that’s not strictly true. I can generally infer the meaning of a “thumbs up” or a thumb and finger in “OK” mode. But those are cartoon representations of actual physical signs, practically prehistoric to where we are now. As more and more of our written communications have migrated from email to texting with various messaging apps, our modern hieroglyphic use has increased exponentially. Just as AI has functionally taken over the ranking of answers in everyday search, so too have emojis become the “lingua franca” between humans communicating via phone, which is basically everyone on planet Earth.

Asian origins

Born from two Japanese words, with “e” meaning picture, and “moji” meaning written character, these modern pictographs are not dissimilar to the Kanji used at their origin. Coming from China and adapted in Japan, the symbols used there in written communication are ideograms, where each character has its own meaning and corresponds to a word. So if you combine the symbol for electricity with the one for car, you get train. The Japanese Ministry of Education mandates a core set of 2,136 characters which they call “jōyō kanji.” These are taught to students through secondary school, and newspapers use them as their baseline for general literacy.

We’ve always had similar things in our language, be it punctuation symbols such as @ or %, numbers and operators such as 3 and +, as well as restroom and traffic signs. Each represents an idea or word as opposed to an individual phonetic sound. They are generally also unambiguous: when you see a stop sign, you don’t have to parse the meaning. Whether you actually come to a complete stop or not is a different issue, one you can discuss with the cop on the corner.

Are they happy or sad?

That’s not the case with the face with the tongue hanging out. Or one with googly eyes. Or a devil with a smile. Or a smiling cat, a pumpkin with a hat or a fire with a face. Yet those are responses I have gotten from friends in online exchanges. I'm never sure if it means they are happy or sad, agreeing or disagreeing, surprised or accepting. The response to “Wasn't that a great concert!” should be a yes or no, agree or disagree, not a smiling triceratops or a bunny holding a carrot. 

On top of that, it seems I am in the middle of a generation gap in emoji usage. A recent survey from The New York Times, based on the unimpeachable data of Google and a completely impeachable analysis of Reddit posts, shows that oldsters use certain emojis while younger folk use others. For instance, teenagers tend towards a fire emoji when indicating approval, while those of a more advanced age use a graphic 100. So forget, “You kids and your rock and roll!” Rather, it’s “You kids and your smiley face with blue streaks streaming down from the eyes!”

If you read this space even semi-regularly you know I appreciate words and word play. But while I have a good visual memory, I don’t speak in pictures, and I don’t write in them either. So Van, I’m glad you liked the cake. Or maybe you hated it. Either way, I’m glad I didn’t take it all home and eat it.

Marc Wollin of Bedford has no idea what peacock, white heart, wilted flower means. His column appears weekly via email and online on Substack and Blogspot as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.