Aug 17, 2021, 09:00
The classic grinning emoji has once more changed its meaning – at least amongst gen Zers. So what is it communicating now – and what should you be using instead?
Smiles better? Not on email ... Photograph: kolotuschenko/Getty Images/iStockphoto
Name: The smiley face emoji.
Appearance: A bland, benign smile on a yellow background.
Meaning: Colossally insulting in every conceivable way.
What? But it’s just a friendly smile. No it isn’t. The smiley face emoji is a weapon of sheer blunt-force trauma. Nothing says “I hate you” more than a smiley face emoji.
Smiley culture.
It's grin out there: why have lockdown deniers co-opted the smiley face?
But … but … why? It’s a tool of passive aggression and dismissiveness. A smiley face emoji at the end of a message is a patronising pat on the head from somebody who wishes you nothing but ill fortune.
I use it all the time. Then you’re a monster.
It’s nice and happy. Let me ask you a question: how old are you?
For the sake of argument, let’s say early 30s. Oh, that’s why. You’re a boomer.
No! I’m a millennial! I’m cool! I wear skinny jeans and side-part my hair. I know which Harry Potter house I’m in. I’m sorry, old-timer. I can’t hear you over your Glenn Miller music and the sound of your walk-in bath filling up.
I see. You must be gen Z. I am. And I have no option but to declare you my sworn enemy.
But we’re almost the same age. It’s still enough to draw a line in the sand. This intergenerational miscommunication was recently reported on by the Wall Street Journal, citing all manner of young people who feel affronted by what they declare is an unforgivably sincere use of the smiley face.
But I like using the smiley face sincerely! Get with the programme, you fossil. Meanings change. Sure, emojis might have been created to signify intended tone in a predominately text-based communication system, but now things have evolved. We only use the smiley face emoji sarcastically now. Everyone knows that.
So what emoji do you use to express happiness? The skull-and-crossbones or skull emoji. It means: “I’m dead” or, in boomer speak: “That’s so funny”.
Seems excessive. Shows what you know. Anyway, the yellow smiley face has become a symbol of unbridled consumerism. It was invented in 1963 as a cheap way to improve the morale of State Mutual Life Assurance Company workers, then licensed to a company that, by 2017, was making £300m from it annually. It’s gross.
Norman Cook, or Fatboy Slim, holding a smiley face at his home in Brighton.
It's not an emoji: Fatboy Slim launches smiley exhibition
But it’s been subverted. It was used in Watchmen and Nirvana inverted the colours and made it look inebriated. It became an icon of acid house. So it was so uncool that people went out of their way to change its meaning?
Yes. And now you use it to tell acquaintances that you enjoyed looking at their baby pictures on Facebook?
OK, fine, I’ll just start using the skull-and-crossbones emoji when I’m happy. What? No. Yuck. Stop trying to be cool and young.
Do say: “Emojis are sarcastic now, keep up.”
Don’t say: “But the aubergine emoji is still OK, right?”
It denotes a smile but to different peoples in their respective situations, it can connote different meanings.
A carefree person will see it as a smile but an angry person may see it as an insult for being sent something that appears insensitive to his situation.
And that is because he thinks it is unforgivably obtuse of others not to empathize with his situation. What's there to be happy about when 'i' am suffering, he argues.
That, however, is about being mired in one's own locus of reference. To only see the world revolving around oneself. The 'me' overwhelms all other personal perceptions.
Some will argue that this dilemma arises from an inter-generational gap. But then again, whilst each generation can depict its own unique median cultural affinities, the argument has to be elongated along the time-axis simply because each generation will age soon enough, and may even become the one it has been busy defying.
So the young will become the middle-aged to become the wrinkled and what one holds dear at one age may have to relent to something else, perhaps diametrically opposite, at a later age owing to changes in circumstances, capacity, capital, even. Acclimatization + adaptation = resilience to survive.
... which may also explain why the energy of the young defies the law of entropy to settle at an equilibrium when old instead of descending into total chaos.
There must be a force embedded inside a person then, as he ages from one stage of life to the next that brings him back to accept and not rebel against the reality of constant change which humbles even as it teases for continuation of effort to break moulds and execute creative destruction in order to try and make some indefinable 'progress'.
Could that force be biological inasmuch sublimative? As the body tissues, hormonal chemicals and organ functions decline with age, the mind sets itself into a comfort zone of typifiable beliefs, mechanistically pulling up the last rampart to fort in the remains of a lifetime peppered by an occasional march of emoji's that record incandescent moods responding to the procession of changes that come out of the blue.
Life is a drama and emoji's are the mind's masks, of a different kind. What then must be the last emoji before exit? Alas, Lao Tze and Chuang Tzu hadn't given any hint......
Give me an emoji for this post - do you like it?
If this emoji is meant to deliver an insult or negative sentiment in any way, then it has failed in its design.
I don't know about all the hungry caterpillars in this world, but I personally don't see anything unusual if others continue to send me messages with this emoji. I will not be offended.
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