In brief praise of emoji

Image copyright Magnific.

I remember the first text I ever sent. It was the spring of 2000. I was working as the in-house English-language guy at a Swiss engineering firm. I had finalized some headlines and punctuation for an announcement, and now someone was at the printer—the business, not the device. Suddenly, a phone call. Something had to be changed, and I needed to confirm how it should be spelled and punctuated. A true orthographic emergency! There was some confusion.

My boss handed me his Nokia and said, quote, “Send it per essemess.”

I could not. He had to show me how to open the SMS function, explain T9 key entry, and only then could I work through this very short message. It took me many minutes but the day—or at least the print run—was saved.

I got my own phone in the fall of 2000 when I started college. In the years that followed, I was a college student and then grad student in the US and UK, never without a cellphone, conducting class coordination, crew meetups, and much of my early relationship with my wife over text. In the US I always had flip phones; in Europe I had indestructible Nokia bricks. The only one of those Nokias that I ever had to replace is currently in the silt at the bottom of the River Cam. Its battery is probably still charged, and to be honest I feel like I failed it rather than the other way around.

Eventually T9 became Blackberry keyboard and then onscreen keyboards with predictive functions. And now “help me write” AI. Just this week I was trying to coordinate a meeting with my erstwhile PhD supervisor, and when it became clear we wouldn’t be able to connect, my Gmail “help me write” function suggested I reply “Bummer!” Maybe because it had geolocated me to California? But that gave me a bit of hope for the future of human judgment.

The point of this Abe-Simpsonesque story is that throughout this early decade of cellphone use, I hated and refused to use emoticons. They were offensive to me, as both a language nerd and punctuation devotee. There are many honest debates to have about how punctuation should be used, I told myself and occasionally others, but surely we should all agree it’s not like *that.* This was like using books as a building material. This was playing disc golf with vintage vinyl. This was misuse of the highest order. Isn’t it funny the semicolon looks like a winky eye? Oh grow up. The apposite Simpsons reference (there usually is one) is this. I was quite a crumudgeon in my younger and more vulnerable years.

I’ve since come around, and the innovation that got me there is the emoji. No, emoji and emoticon are not the same, as the Encyclopedia Britannica (!) explains. The emoji is a distillation of the emoticon spirit, but by stripping out the typographical raw material, we’ve managed to create a new communication medium, something like a written facial expression or gesture. And those can perform all kinds of functions that short text isn’t really suited to. The kissy face can cover a lot of interpretive space. And it’s just better—clearer, easier, more emotionally accurate—to reply with a thumbs-up rather than the previous alternative, “K”. Once texting convention had degraded to the point of misusing letters and punctuation for purely graphical purposes, I was able to appreciate the emoji both for what it was and for what it replaced.

At least that’s how I’ve convinced myself that it’s not just a case of tragically fallen standards. Do I contradict myself? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯