If Geoffrey Chaucer lived today and wrote ‘The Canterbury Tales’ on his smartphone how would he have written, “Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote...?” No doubt with pictures of rain clouds, trees, and birds. And his readers would have reacted to his work with a heart, a laughing face, a thumbs up sign, a face with the mouth turned into the shape of the letter O to mean wow or one that’s red and frowning (the reaction of those who would not have understood what he is talking about).
But Chaucer is not here today. So his Canterbury Tales remain as obscure as the riddle of the Sphinx whereas if he had written his poems using those instantly recognizable cartoons called emoji which can be understood even across linguistic barriers, readers all over the world would have grasped he is talking about the joys of April showers – the kind that’s falling outside my window right now.
Even if you are not using a smartphone or Twitter, Instagram or Facebook you would still be familiar with emoji. These days they appear on t-shirts, billboards, and even in official rulings issued by High Court judges. Three years ago emoji gained celebrity status when the Oxford Dictionary named the “Face with Tears of Joy” emoji the Word of the Year. Someone has already put together a song-length emoji translation of Beyonce’s ‘Drunk in love’ while someone else, believe it or not, translated all of Moby-Dick (titled, inevitably, Emoji Dick). Then there is the website emojianalysis that will track your recent emoji use to analyze your emotional well-being.
And that’s just a glimpse of the power of emoji. If we count all emoji —Smiling Face, Smiling Face With Smiling Eyes, Grinning Face, Winking Face, Smiling Face With Heart-Shaped Eyes, Kissing Face and Kissing Face With Closed Eyes, Face With Stuck-Out Tongue With Tightly Closed Eyes, not to mention House With Garden and sunny day and Ghost and Money and Hamburger we will end up with 722 symbols – symbols that might at first seem ridiculous. After all, they are a small invasive cartoon army of faces and vehicles and flags and food trying to topple the millennial-long reign of words.
Yet, they are fast becoming a powerful form of communication. Emoji is now the official language of the country called the Internet. But let’s get this straight, emoji (born in a true eureka moment, from the mind of a single man: Shigetaka Kurita of Japan), simply are not relevant for long-form written communication: complex prose, scientific journals, literature (and probably not good for Chaucer, either). Emojis’ relevance lies in the abbreviated digital messages of daily life — social-media quips, texted jokes and chat messages.
It is not easy, explains Tyler Schnoebelen, a linguistics Ph.D. from Stanford, to express our emotions through electronic devices. If you are talking to someone face-to-face, you don’t need an additional word or symbol to express, “I’m smiling” because you would, presumably, be smiling. The psychologist Albert Mehrabian, in an oft-cited study, determined in the 1950s that only 7 percent of communication is verbal (what we say), while 38 percent is vocal (how we say it) and 55 percent is nonverbal (what we do and how we look while we’re saying it). This is well and good for face-to-face communication, but when we are texting, 93 percent of our communicative tools are negated.
Enter emoji.
According to Vyvyan Evans, the author of The Emoji Code, these icons help to reproduce in the digital environment almost all the characteristics of human communication in the real world. The symbols work in a manner similar to non-verbal cues in face-to-face interactions (body language, intonation, and facial expressions) and communicate the nuances of mood and emotion between people who cannot see the gestures of their interlocutor. The emoji can make up for the useful cues that are often missing from digital chit-chatting: the raise of an eyebrow, the shrug of the shoulders, the rolling of an eye.
Things, however, can get lost in translation and create chaos extremely quickly. For example, just what does a wink mean–flirting, joking, conspiring, agreeing, or lying? Some emoji can also mean different things to different groups of people. If someone sends you a picture of pizza or cheese, for instance, it might not have anything to do with food. In the new lexicon, pictures of pizza popping up on a smartphone might mean “I love you”.
Love and laughter, it appears are the best emotions that can be conveyed through emoji. Emoji are not well designed to convey hatred. “There really are no negative or mean emoji,” says Lindsey Weber, who co-curated the “Emoji” art show. “There’s no violent or aggressive emoji. Even the angry faces are hilarious or silly.” Sure, there’s a gun emoji. But it’s a harmless water pistol. Imagine sending a death threat using a water pistol and a blushing face. If it’s possible to “soften” a death threat, emoji would do it.
No doubt, then, in spite of the naysayers who see doom in this new form of communication, we have stumbled on the best possible way to connect with each other through these tiny pictures. We have been given a whole new vocabulary to say “I’m laughing,” or “happy,” or “Well done.” Thanks to the emoji we blow each other kisses, we smile with hearts in our eyes. We cry tears of joy. Emoji language is simple, and silly but it works and that’s what matters.
So why waste words. Imagine I sent you a pizza and a line of smiley faces.
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