Face with Tears of Joy

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. In 2013, the Oxford English Dictionary added the word emoji. And two years after that, lexicographers at that dictionary chose for their own word of the year an actual emoji.

It’s the one that’s officially known as face with tears of joy. And that’s the little round face that’s crying with laughter. And this little symbol beat out other trendy terms at the time, including on fleek and Brexit and dark web. And the fact that the OED was acknowledging this symbol in that kind of way got people to thinking more about just how emojis function as a way of conveying meaning. And as you know, Grant, linguist Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gaughan have argued really convincingly that in text-based communication, emoji function a lot like gestures. And one other thing that I find really interesting about emoji is the way that these little units of meaning get repurposed to mean new things.

Like, for example, my stepson, who’s in Gen Z, uses the skull emoji to indicate that something’s extremely funny because people that age use the slang expression, I’m dead, to mean something’s really funny. Something really strikes them as amusing. And there’s another emoji that he uses that looks like a blue trucker’s cap. And that’s now commonly used to indicate lying. And that’s a reference to the slang expression cap, which means lie or no cap, meaning no lie. So if somebody sends you something that you doubt, you can just send a blue cap back, meaning lie.

And one other thing, without giving away any spoilers, if you watch that riveting Netflix crime series, Adolescents, you know that the meanings of certain emoji are a key part of the plot. And as for the peach emoji, of course, I’ll just say that sometimes a peach is not a peach. I think that one’s well known. It’s a little naughty.

Yes. And if you want a really deep dive into this stuff, there’s a new book called Face with Tears of Joy, A Natural History of the Emoji. It’s by Keith Houston, who’s the author of another wonderful book about the history of punctuation called Shady Characters. But one of the things that really struck me in this book is the fact that it’s really difficult to pinpoint exactly when emoji took off and who invented them. So those are some of the things that I’ve been thinking about since I’ve read this book.

And I’m wondering, Grant, you’ve been digging into it. What struck you?

Well, I appreciate a lot of what you just said. I had so many different paths to take. One of the things that I love to talk about when you and I are on the road doing our live presentations is paralinguistic restitution, which is what emoji and emoticons do. They put back into the written language things that are really easy to do when we’re speaking aloud.

So paralinguistic means related to linguistics and restitutions mean restoring. So that’s what emoji are doing. They’re helping us bring the written language to the level that we’re capable of when we’re speaking face to face. And the other thing is that the skull emoji, I love not only the fact that it’s a new iteration on I’m dead, meaning I’m dead from laughter, but we have other slang about, you know, you’re killing me, we might say, if somebody’s making us laugh till our sides hurt. And so there’s this whole slang path that now ends in this emoji. It’s kind of cool.

Well, that book, again, if you want to check it out, is called Face with Tears of Joy, A Natural History of the Emoji. It’s by Keith Houston. Keith Houston. We’ll have that link on our website.

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