News item: Oxford Dictionaries selects "tears of joy" emoji as Word of the Year.
"OMG," she said. "The Word of the Year isn't even a word."
I was stunned: "WTF?"
"It's true," she said. "It's a symbol, the crying-happy-face digital icon for 'tears of joy.' "
"LOL. Seems appropriate to you," I said.
Couldn't deny that. She wakes up with tears of joy every day - glances over at me, mutters something about nightmares being real, then bursts into tears of joy. Great, heaving sobs of joy.
"I want to stab you in the heart with scissors :-)" she replied. "I want to club you over the head :-)"
I might have been imagining the :-) part.
This is the way we communicate today, in texted acronyms and emojis - the word is borrowed from the Japanese - and emoticons fashioned from keyboard punctuation.
Still seems a strange move for the Oxford University Press, though. Usually, its Word of the Year is a term plucked from pop culture; "vape" was its pick in 2014, "selfie" the year before that.
If such choices sound a tad jarring coming from the august, venerable publisher - like hearing the Queen drop an F-bomb after tripping over a corgi - this year's selection of an emoji was like finding out she spends her days playing Call of Duty on her iPhone.
It's disconcerting to those who, IMO, grew up in a less frantic era, when a clock didn't really need a second hand (ask your dad what a second hand is, junior) and folks had time to communicate in entire sentences, or at least whole words.
Such people are uncertain of today's shorthand. (I know someone who thought LOL stood not for Laugh Out Loud, but for Lots Of Love. So she would send messages like "I heard your cat died. LOL." She now has no friends.) These people also have trouble with tone, with inferring the emotion intended in social-media conversations - but then everyone, regardless of age, is in the same boat, missing the vocal cues of spoken conversation. (Gosh, wouldn't it be gr8 if we had some sort of device where we could just punch in a number and talk to each other without typing?) That's why you have to add LOL or Ha!Ha! or a smiley face to messages lest the reader take you the wrong way, drive to your house and key your car, which is how most social media exchanges conclude.
This is the standard pattern for Facebook conversations:
First writer: "Point."
Second writer: "Lighthearted counter-point."
Third writer: "YOU MUST BE A MASONIC TERRORIST LIKE TRUDEAU/MULCLIAR/$TEVEN HARPER!"
Then everyone backs away from the keyboard, being careful not to make eye contact or mention Obama.
In an attempt to defuse such escalating online ugliness, Victoria author Ian Ferguson routinely drops the phrase "YOUR WORST THEN HITTLER!!!" into any Facebook debate that looks like it's about to descend into a troll-fest.
The line echoes Victoria comedian Wes Borg's song Worse Than Hitler (it's a send-up of West Coast sensibilities) except Ian intentionally butchers every word: your instead of you're, worst instead of worse, then instead of than, two T's in Hitler. It's obviously a parody of Facebook looniness.
Except not everybody gets the parody part. So common are MISSPELLED ALL-CAPS RANTS that some take Ian's Hitler line at face value. Either way, the effect is the same: Once he plays the H-card - the ace in the social-media deck - the conversation comes to a screeching halt.
"It stops any online argument in its tracks," he says.
Maybe what we need is not an emoji - a device that reduces complicated thoughts to quickly thumbed grunts - but something that translates our instant knee-jerk reactions into something more nuanced and intelligent. Punch in a tears-of-joy emoji and what would emerge on the other end would be a bit of Khalil Gibran: "Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears."
If you don't agree, then YOUR WORST THEN HITTLER!!!
