Emojified!

“I see that you have made three spelling mistakes.” – Last words of Thomas de Mahy, Marquis de Favras, upon reading his death warrant in 1790.

There are those, like the snarky Marquis, who would suggest the English language has been in decline since at least the 18th century. Modern literati (if such still exist) would no doubt agree en masse.

I, too, used to lament the death of language. The ossification of grammar, of literacy; the dumbification of discourse and vocabulary so that “awesome” equals ordinary and every hack noun is verbified.

Hello and welcome to today’s linguistic lesson with your rhetorical host, Pinky Tourette.

Like many weaned on the antiquated act of reading, I, too, mourned the flaming death of trad media: of books, of newspapers, of printed matter. I clucked like Chicken Little as the masses flocked to handheld devices to replace paper, pixels vs. pages, virtual vs. tactile. And ever downward raced the reading spiral, disposing even of the interactive act of actually eyeballing (verbification!) words, instead choosing to have them read out loud like your kindergarten teacher Miss Crabapple used to do, spoonfeeding them directly into your lazy cortex, tonguing them into your soft medulla ob-la-di ob-la-da.

Not to mention the internet. Lord below, please let’s not mention the internet.

Okay, the internet. That elephants’ graveyard of articulacy. Where paragraphs are banished, structured thought is verboten, and even complete sentences are relics of the ancient middle age. Like, you know, 2010 or something.

Instead we speak now in memes and gifs and abbreviations and initials. Cognitive shorthand. Oratory reduced to 240 characters / three minutes. Yes, I, too, lamented.

Until enlightenment struck. This is not the death of language, as so often portrayed. It is instead the kickback, the reaction, the inevitable return to roots.

Emojis aren’t the death of articulacy, they are the punk (punc?) rock of language. Stripping it back to its most basic; like hieroglyphics or pictographs, they cut straight to the raw fundamentals of linguistics.

Let’s face it: language is complicated. None more so than English, with all that grammar and syntax and prepositions and homophones and participial phrases and more tenses than you can shake a predicate at. Smarter people than I (you’re shocked such folk exist, I know) have taken cracks at simplifying the way we speak. George Orwell swung a sharp satirical axe at it with his newspeak. A lost generation of idealists (many of them science fiction adherents) threw their pimply weight behind Esperanto as the new universal language. Never quite caught on. General public couldn’t care less.

The point is (or maybe isn’t) that language evolves. Yes, nouns are verbified. Hyphens fade as awkwardly manufactured compounds become commonplace and teen-agers no longer play base-ball; instead teenagers play baseball.

At the same time, words take on entirely new meanings over time. That’s cool. (And no, I don’t mean it’s chilly.)

And so emojis have stormed the auctorial arena like little Johnnies and Sids undermining all that high-falutin’ language that scholars and professors and the intelligentsia have spent eons mining and refining and feeding back to the masses from their wood-paneled offices cluttered with Nobels and Bookers and Pulitzers.

Fug that noise. We don’t need your edumacation. The proles have seized the reins of language and will wield it like a blacksmith wields a flounder. Or, you know, whatever.

Hang the old guard. Dangle the participles. Not for today the antiquated intercourse of yesteryear. Render unto the Marquis de Favras an emoji death sentence and see how witty he is then!