We
already know, thanks to the Internet, email, and social media that our language
is becoming bastardized. Technology has
not aided the preservation of the English language, even if it’s greatly
increased the amount of communication that transpires over the digital
transom. We now have sunk even lower
with the expansion of emojis.
There’s
even an official body to oversee the modern-day hieroglyphics, The Unicode
Consortium. They will unveil the 72 new
symbols in June. Six dozen more images
will come to express emotions, gestures, sports, foods, animals and other
things that we used to apply the task of having real words label or describe.
Will
we turn into the Chinese, using hundreds of characters to convey a thought, its
meaning dependent on just slight inflections of the voice or a juxtaposition on paper?
I
don’t like where this is going. I get
the happy face, sad face imagery. It’s
pretty clear cut what they mean. The
rest is all bullshit. Why must we
continue to make up words that formulate Netspeak? Why must we remove grammar and proper
spelling just because the communication is texted? Why do we shorten words, reducing some to one
letter? R U following me? Thnx.
The
emojis, if we keep expanding the roster into the hundreds or thousands, could
threaten our digital communications to the point we will defeat the purpose of
correspondence, which is to actually understand each other.
Emojis
make us lazy and continued mass-scale use will leave people with weakened
writing skills. Our vocabularies will suffer.
As we fail to communicate in detail, tone and depth – with emojis and
not words – we make our world seem smaller, if not simpler. Emojis lack texture, context, and description.
Sure a picture is worth a thousand words, but emojis can’t accurately reflect nor
inspire deep thoughts, raw feelings, nor reflect well-developed ideas.
Emojis
are nothing more than the graffiti of today’s tech-savvy but
relationship-deficient generation. Do I
heart emojiis? Do they make me smile or
frown? They leave me feeling crappy. Oh,
wait there’s an emoji for that. Here you
go – see, I wasted words trying to tell you how I feel when I could’ve just
clicked on this singular image. Maybe
I’m the deficient one. Sorry, no emoji
to represent that concept or state of being.
Not yet, anyway.
We’re
in the ugly era of OMG, LMAO, and TMI.
If you don’t know what those mean, you are screwed. But the truth is, we’re all going to pay a
heavy price if we keep replacing the English language with abbreviations,
images and net slang. L
It
was announced recently that someone had transcribed the Bible into a version
that is filled only with emojis. Yes, a
whole book, one that is challenging enough to live by, let alone understand and
interpret, is now in full emoji form. Will this be repeated for other
classics? Instead of “reading
Shakespeare” we will piece his works together as if we’re playing Pictionary.
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