By Katy Waldman - Slate
The Oxford Dictionaries “Word” of the Year 2015 has landed. It’s 😂, aka face with tears of joy, already weeping with relief at its victory. (I suppose we asked for this.) Casper Grathwohl, president of Oxford Dictionaries, explains the choice, which set off revels in emojiland: “Traditional alphabet scripts have been struggling to meet the rapid-fire, visually focused demands of 21st Century communication. It’s not surprising that a pictographic script like emoji has stepped in to fill those gaps—it’s flexible, immediate, and infuses tone beautifully." That said, according to the press release, “there are no plans to add emoji to any Oxford Dictionaries.”
TJ—let’s call him TJ—is the most commonly used emoji on Earth. In 2015, he constituted 20 percent of all deployed emojis in the U.K., and 17 percent in the U.S. This can’t be chalked wholly up to the little guy’s semantic utility, though: He gets a popularity boost from the tendency of some users to clone him and string him into conga lines.
More
And at Flavorwire:
…Read More
More
And at Flavorwire:
In Defense of That Dumb Emoji as Oxford English Dictionary’s ‘Word of the Year’
“That’s right,” wrote the Oxford English Dictionary blog yesterday, “for the first time ever, the [OED] Word of the Year is a pictograph.”…Read More
