(~6 minutes to read)
Are you one of the old school that laments the use of abbreviations and picture symbols in communications?
The folk over at Oxford Dictionaries clearly aren’t. Their 2015 Word of the Year is… 
.
Yep. That’s right.
It’s an emoji, and its official name is “Face with Tears of Joy”. It was chosen, because – and I quote – “[it] best reflected the ethos, mood, and preoccupations of 2015.”
It’s going to be interesting to juxtapose that with whatever turns out to be voted the most read/significant news event of 2015.
That aside, I’m currently struggling with the fact that it was the organization behind one of the most respected dictionaries in the world that selected a symbol as its word of the year. I fully accept that the use of symbols as well as abbreviations is here to stay, and I also acknowledge that they are very useful informal communication tools. However, if words of the year and their shortlist siblings are contenders for inclusion in a future dictionary, where will be filed? How will other emoji be sequenced?
There’s an online quiz that you can take to see how well you know your emoji, and in the name of research I took it.
The bad news is that I scored 21%. 
The good news is that I was one of 9098 people who scored less than 50%. 
What Goes Around…
Emoji (the plural is either emoji or emojis) are just one of many short forms of communication that we use today, but the use of symbols to communicate predates written communication by a very long time. Once scriptorial documentation had evolved sufficiently, writers adopted all kinds of abbreviations for commonly-used words, and several forms of shorthand were developed from the sixteenth century on. The famous English Diarist Samuel Pepys wrote in shorthand (which was very prudent, given the number of sexual indiscretions he chronicled; had Elisabeth, his wife, read any of those entries, his career as a diarist and naval administrator may have come to a sudden mariticidal halt!)
However, the transition from pictograph (such as Egyptian hieroglyphs) to script is universally considered a great leap forward in communications, so we’ll take a great leap forward in time, to the 19th century.
— — .-. … . -.-. — -.. . (Morse Code)
The 19th century saw the introduction of technology to communication. Morse code was developed as a means of communicating messages via pulses of electricity. It seems to have been recognized relatively quickly that communication speed could be increased if full words were not transmitted, so a set of abbreviations evolved. Examples include “WUD” for “would” and “PLS” for “please”. Initialisms were also used – for example, “GM” and “GA” for “good morning” and “good afternoon” respectively.
Not a million miles from LOL, BTW and IMO…
Perhaps the most famous Morse code signal though is “SOS”. And in researching for this article, I learned some interesting stuff. If only I had space to include it here!
Most people know that • • • – – – • • • is the internationally-recognized distress call. When it was proposed and adopted (in 1908), it was proposed in the form of dots and dashes, not as letters. Its attraction was that it was nine pulses long, was broken into three groups of three, and since dots outnumbered dashes, was more likely to be able to be transmitted on a fading power source. The pattern is transmitted as a continuous sequence rather than with a pause between letters, making it a Morse prosign. Prosigns are represented in written form using the letters that the dot-dash pattern equates to. • • • – – – • • • equates to “SOS”, but also to “VTB”, “IJS”, “VGI” and “SMB”. (Prosign letters also have a line above them. Please forgive my omission of those lines!)
“SOS” quickly became the standard prosign for • • • – – – • • • . Apparently, a 1918 telegraphy book stated that there was no special significance in the letters themselves. The various interpretations of SOS (e.g., “Save Our Souls”, “Save Our Ship”, and “Stop Other Signals”) are backronyms that make it easy to remember the letters, which in turn make it easy to remember the Morse code for the prosign.
Smileys
The Smiley (or as it seems to be better known, “Happy Face”) existed in a number of forms starting as far back as 1900. According to a BBC radio programme broadcast in 2012, the Smiley as we know it was created in 1963 by an American named Harvey Ball, who was paid $45.00 for it. Neither he nor the people who paid him bothered to copyright it, so others have made a pile of money from variants/replicas of the design. I haven’t been able to get to the bottom of the ownership debate, but it seems that a company with the rather predictable name of “Smiley Co.” has the design registered in more than eighty countries.
Emoticons
According to Oxford Dictionaries, the word originated in the 1990s, but as a phenomenon, emoticons seem to have been around since the second half of the 19th century. For example, a U.S. satirical magazine, “Puck”, published a set of emoticons that they referred to as “Typographical Art” in 1881.
The first documented use of the emoticons 🙂 and 🙁 occurred in 1982 – way before the internet and cellphones with texting capabilities became available to the masses. Finally we had a way to express the joy, sadness and humorous intent implicit in our emails!
The transition from text to icons/pictograms had to wait until it was common to use a computer that was capable of handling more than text.
And then it had to wait until someone realized that they could substitute 🙂 with
if the typeface (font) included it.
Going from to 
required the ability to embed graphics in text, but we’ve had that ability for many, many years now, even in email programs on computers and on cell phones.
And given the popularity of the image, the ensuing ownership claims and law suits are hardly surprising.
…Comes Around
And so to the present day, and Oxford Dictionaries’ 2015 Word of the Year.
Emoji are a Japanese contribution to communication. They are ideograms – graphic symbols that represent ideas or concepts. Because they’re Japanese, some of the symbols are a little odd to western eyes – for example, “face with medical mask” ? “face with look of triumph” 
and “person bowing deeply”. ? I included “face with medical mask” after some friends commented to me that they saw a number of East Asian folk out in the back country of the Canadian Rockies watching a lunar eclipse wearing medical masks. It seemed strange to my friends; and it seems strange to me, given the purity of the air up there.
Emoji have been enthusiastically embraced – they’ve appeared in several releases of the Unicode standard, a computing industry standard for the consistent processing of text expressed in most of the world’s writing systems. No smartphone is complete without them. Webmail facilities such as Gmail offer them, as do email programs such as Mozilla’s Thunderbird. Heck – I’m sure that modern microwave ovens display an appropriate emoji (“person salivating impatiently”) when the food’s cooked!
It’s highly unlikely that emoji and other, future pictograms will complete an evolutionary circle by replacing text-based communication. The Egyptian hieroglyphs and their antecedents and successors were all limited in their ability to express information.
Imagine a world in which all non-verbal communication is conducted using techniques used by self-assembly furniture companies such as IKEA. Material tolerances for airplanes and ships being specified by pictographs – now there’s a challenge for a Technical Communicator. Groucho Marx’s quote – “A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.” – might provide inspiration for who might attempt to compose such a set of instructions!
Your Turn
What’s your take on the Oxford Dictionaries’ choice for 2015? Do you use emoji or emoticons? How would you react to them being in your performance review or “workforce adjustment notification”? Let me know by leaving a comment.