Emoji

Emoji (絵文字えもじ?, Japanese pronunciation: [emodʑi]) are the ideograms or smileys used in Japanese electronic messages and Web pages, the use of which is spreading outside Japan. Originally meaning pictograph, the word emoji literally means "picture" (e) + "character" (moji).

In the past couple of days, I've learned something new:  All those grinning and frowning and angry little faces on the smart phones (the ones that we embed in our texts) are called Emoji.

If you're saying something potentially inflammatory and tack on a smiling face, or if you try to soften a remark with a Smiley, the message can be confusing: do I smile back or respond to the words?

That happened with two people this week.  Once, I was the receiver, the other time the sender. In both cases, the message was incongruent with the smiley face.  "Why did you send a smiley emoji when you said that?" my daughter asked me.

I had to look up the word.  I was trying to use a pictogram to convey a lighter tone than my words did.

Then, as things happen, I received such a text from Mike--and had the exact same response: I wanted to understand the tone of the sender. I felt, as Day had felt, that he was saying one thing in words, another in the emoji: "Let's laugh"--even though the words didn't strike me as funny.

Maybe emoji are new forms of nervous laughter.   Maybe they are our attempts to mimic face-to-face conversation on a tiny text screen. Either way, it's conversational shorthand that can undermine what we really mean.