Like most of the modern world, I’m addicted to emojis.
I have trouble ending a text without some kind of smiley face.
Not that I’m very skilled in their use. For a while, I used the smiley face with the open hands until I realized this was the “hug” emoji. I immediately stopped using it, out of caution more than anything. Never can be too careful.
I frequently use the face sticking out his tongue, and sometimes throw in the sweaty forehead guy. My co-worker tends to use the guy who shrugs his shoulders a lot. He just doesn’t know.
I'm also adept at supercool texting lingo like “lol”. As with most of these abbreviations, it gets over-used. Did I really “laugh out loud” when you sent that text? No, I didn’t, but I’ll let you think I did anyway.
Some teenage girls have gone a step further (according to my daughter, who is well versed), where they pronounce the full abbreviation of “lol” as “lawl” in their conversations. But they don’t say it while actually laughing out loud at someone’s joke. They say it with a straight face, as in, “Lawl, that’s funny, I'm almost cracking a smile.”
I fear it’s only a matter of time before emojis enter our everyday speech. Fortunately, we don’t yet have the means to do this other than showing our own creepy smiling faces. But there is already some evidence of emoji-speak using our bodies, such as shaping your hands like a heart when in front of a camera. We haven’t started doing this in the office yet, but I’m sure it’s coming.
The same temptation arises in more formal writing. At times, I want to add a smiley face at the end of sentences when writing my blog. This is ridiculous, but I frequently feel the urge. I read an email from a younger woman (let’s call her a “Millennial”) where she couldn’t stop using “ha ha” after every other sentence. It was unnecessary, but better than writing “lol” and much better than inserting “like” into every sentence, which is also common in Millennial parlance.... that, along with the liberal use of “literally.”
Allow me to provide an example typical teenage speech: “I, like, loved that meme! I was like, literally, lawling on the floor!”
I’m probably out to lunch on how teenagers actually talk, but it was my best shot.
It is interesting, though, how you can tell the age of a person by simply listening to them speak or even by reading their texts. Older people tend to speak in full, complete sentences with a lot of “uhs” and “ums”. They might come across as overly forthright in their texts because of their lack of friendly smiley faces.
My age group (let’s call them Generation X) clings to some of the older language vices while also adopting some newer ones. We might over use “like” at times, but we use abbreviations less than our younger peers. Our texts might include full sentences with fully spelled out words. We use emojis, but usually only one a time. Strings of emojis are a dead give-away that a younger person is texting.
And this brings me to that generation, those who’ve grown up with devices in their hands since birth (Generation Z?). For these youngsters, texting is more organic, like speech. You can throw out every grammar rule in the book. You might also need a manual to figure out all the abbreviations, IMHO! And who cares if auto-correct makes a sentence unintelligible? It’s a text, for Pete’s sake, not a letter to the Queen!
Ah, letters, I remember writing those... They started out with, “Dear so-and-so" and ended with, “Yours truly”. They contained a body with a message that required thought and care. How quaint.
Lawl.
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