Emoji

Well, golly, maybe this old fart can learn

I’ve been known to use the occasional Emoji. Cowboy hat guy, 🤠, yep, he seems appropriate for me. The good ol’ thumbs up, 👍, that’s good for agreement when I’m texting without my glasses and can’t see well enough to actually write words. Sunglasses dude, 😎, for when I think I’ve written something particularly clever. And of course some variation of laughing person, 🤣, for when I am trying to convey that my words shouldn’t be taken seriously.

But that’s pretty much it.

I fancy myself a writer, after all, and as such widespread use of pictograms seems antithetical to my craft.

Plus, of course, I’m an old fart.

Emoji are for the young. And I know that the young have really embraced them. Heck, I know that younger generations may even get pretty graphic in their sexual flirting using these little pictures.

Beyond what I’ve just written though, I haven’t contemplated much more at all about Emoji. That’s it, a sometimes helpful thing that I’ve almost exclusively left to others.

Until yesterday…

Photo by Tim Witzdam on Unsplash

Here in Washington, each year or so our Department of Agriculture publishes a new edition of The Washington State Livestock Brand Book. And I suppose that I never thought, until yesterday, than an Emoji can sort of be like a Brand. No, there isn’t a ‘Rockin’ R’ Emoji (I don’t imagine anyway) but they are both the same sort of shorthand.

If I slap my Brand on a steer, that is an instant type of communication. It communicates that: ‘This steer is the property of Cameron M. Bailey, and if you take it, we are going to have a problem.”

The Brand communicates that message, without having to get out a can of spray paint and writing all those words on the side of the steer. Pretty slick deal, if you think about it.

And that, I guess, is how Emoji works in my mind.

I can respond to someone’s comment here on Substack, and throw into that response, a laughing face. 😂 That (hopefully) communicates to the person that my comment is in jest and made to be teasing or funny. The face allows me to communicate intent, or emotion without having to type out something like: ‘Hey man, your comment made me think of something funny, please don’t be offended, I’m writing it here to entertain, not to convey anything negative.’

Shorthand, like a livestock Brand.

But, ultimately, I suppose that yesterday I realized that Emoji is or can be a language all its own. A language that can communicate at a much deeper level than I considered in the past. Perhaps, sort of like the hieroglyphs of the ancient Egyptians.

This came to me because cruising around the online world, I encountered a person using a nickname, or a screen name, composed entirely of Emoji.

I may have encountered this in the past, I don’t know, but this one really caught my attention, and stuck hard, because she writes and I was reading quite a bit of her Emoji free text.

Doing so, I somehow realized that her Emoji nickname fit her absolutely perfectly.

And how cool is that!

But it gets a touch more complicated.

If one takes her Emoji nickname and instead of the images uses the name of the images, well, then it no longer has the same impact. It’s not quite nonsensical when written out, but its not impactful either.

Sort of like reading a good translation of a foreign language novel, as opposed to a transliteration of that same book.

The Emoji images make the impact, and that impact causes one to remember.

That points, I think, to Emoji being or becoming a language all its own.

And that is something that I hadn’t considered before.

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Looking for more English language from me? No, Emoji, I promise! I’ve got some recent favorites collected here.