At first glance, I am an unlikely candidate for the use of emojis, those tiny illustrations used to jazz up even the most mundane conversations by text, email or twitter.
I rarely used their earliest incarnation, the smiley face emoticon :-) or the heart emoticon <3 because I believed it was a slippery slope which meant I was only a hop and a skip away from sending text messages without using full words. At which point the sky would fall in and poor chicken licken would be all in a heap.
I use full stops in text messages. And commas. I try to use words carefully to ensure the tone of the message – funny or poignant or THE BINS.
PLEASE. TAKE. OUT. THE. BINS. is clear.
I didn’t, or so I thought, need any extra support mechanisms in my communication apart from capital letters (see above). If something was funny, my logic went, it should be funny. It shouldn’t need so much as an exclamation mark. No wot I mean ???!!!!???? ;-) :-(
It’s not so long ago that my mother, who is always on Facebook and handily tells me everything I need to know about Facebook without my having to be on it myself, told me about Nell McCafferty’s stance on emoticons/emojis. Apparently she was scolding people for using emojis in their communication with her.
If I understood my mother correctly, McCafferty had banned her Facebook “friends” from using them. This was yet further proof that emoticons/emojis were not for me. If journalism legends like McCafferty were agin them, then I was agin them.
Until suddenly I wasn’t.
It started, as so many things do now such as marriages/wars over Page 3/actual wars, with a tweet. A friend tweeted me a supportive message and finished it with
I’ll try to explain the effect those dancing senoritas had on me. It was like a little party was happening in my heart. That senorita said so much but, and this was the thing, she said it without words. It tickled me, infused everything with joy. But when I looked at my phone I couldn’t find the senorita or any other emoji for that matter. It seemed I wasn’t emoji-enabled, if that’s an actual expression. (I just googled that. It
is
an actual expression
So it was only the other week when I finally got around to updating the software on my iPhone, that the world of emoticons became available to me. Talk about a kid in a Minecraft store. I went into emoji overdrive. I couldn’t stop. “Did an emoji truck crash into your house?” a colleague asked and still I didn’t care. I was emoting all over the place. Camels. Skyscrapers. Bananas. Televisions. Big headed women in black leotards. There is an emoji for every occasion and every emotion. A fried egg in a pan; pieces of sushi; a wad of euro; a helicopter ; a rocket; a top hat; a tractor; a woman getting a head massage. There is even one of a piece of poo with eyes which I’m less drawn to then say the aubergine or the glass of red wine.
Of course like a lot of the best ideas it’s a Japanese invention; the word Emoji is an anglicisation of Japanese characters that means “picture letter”.
It is a whole new (ok, I’m a very late adopter, new is pushing it) language that can be understood across continents and generations. It is pithy and cheering in a way “R U coming to the Prty? :-)” can never quite achieve. It means when Colin Farrell appears on
Claire Byrne Live
to eloquently give his support for equal marriage, you don’t need words just a tweet that says: Colin Farrell .
When Barack Obama made his state of the union address recently, his speech was translated into emojis in the Guardian. This sort of made me think we've reached peak emoji but that's fine by me: Thus spaketh that newspaper: "His address to Congress was all about 'finding areas where we agree, so we can deliver for the American people'. And if there's one thing we can all agree upon, it's emojis."
I’ve been feeling down a lot lately and I know it might seem facetious, but these little pictures have lifted my heart. Thank you for letting me go on about them. It’s been emojinal. roisin@irishtimes.com
