(Uli Seit/The New York Times)ULI SEIT/The New York Times
We don't know whether to laugh or cry. Here we are toiling away at keyboards, pecking out letters to form words that become sentences that turn into paragraphs and end up as Very Important Punditry, when all this time we could have been expressing our ideas in a series of handy pictographs.
What the deuce?
No, it's true. Oxford Dictionaries, bastion of the language and publisher of the definitive Oxford English Dictionary, has named an emoji as its word of the year. Not the word "emoji" – an actual emoji. An emoji is a "small digital image or icon used to express an idea or emotion in electronic communication," according to Oxford Dictionaries. The emoji in question, a little yellow laughing face with big tears coming out of the eyes, refers to something so funny, you laugh until you cry.
For language purists, it's like Le Cordon Bleu naming a picture of a croissant as the croissant of the year. The thought is so offensive to them that they haven't the words to express the multiple emotions occurring inside them simultaneously. If only they had a way to do that in a succinct fashion. But they don't.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Because, what is language if not a rigid series of symbols that, when placed in a codified sequence, convey a fixed meaning to the viewer that cannot be misinterpreted? Because no one ever misinterprets words, right, or expresses an idea by using words that signify the opposite of the intended meaning? Right?
Language evolves. Shakespeare invented more than 1,700 words, metamorphosing (that's one of them) the English vocabulary. Now the language is evolving again in the digital era, led by teenaged Shakespeares LOLing on smartphones. Oxford Dictionaries has gone out on a limb by naming an non-word as its word of the year, but the point is well taken. To catalogue how we communicate today, you have to include the shorthand that has become a part of our lives.
Why? Because it's 2015.