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It's like the way that millennials communicate with emoji I'm GenX and not a millennial. I don't see anything wrong with using some emoji as part of my langua

It's like the way that millennials communicate with emoji I'm GenX and not a millennial. I don't see anything wrong with using some emoji as part of my language. I already speak a language (English) which is some bastard child of French, German, Dutch, Arabic, etc. I'm happy to add a (poo emoji) when it's appropriate.

KaiserPro 11y ago
emoticons were annoying on MSN messenger. I'd hope that people will grow out of it, like they did back then. but perhaps they are here to stay.
- cazum 11y ago
  I don't think MSN users grew out of emoticons, they just stopped using MSN. Facebook chat, Skype and SMS picked up where MSN left off, and all three of those have a strong emoticon game.
  - KaiserPro 11y ago
    interesting, first it appears people really love emojis here, my original post lost me some karma... second there was a massive gap in my friend group between MSN emoticons dieing out and emojis seeping in. Perhaps my experiences are abnormal....
- freehunter 11y ago
  I don't think they'll ever go away, and that's because of the nature of short-form text communications. You need to express emotion, something language is bad at doing in short-form. Longer expressions can have great flowery emotion, but "im gonna kill you" can mean a lot of different things depending on the emoticon or emoji that follows it. And that's really important. Some people write long messages to convey emotion. Others use ambiguous phrases and follow it up with a quick expression of emotion to set the context.
deleted 11y ago
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zkhalique 11y ago
Emojis are fine. But I remember the first times I started seeing "LOL" and "ROTFLMAO". And I realized that the person wasn't really laughing, but they were quietly typing that on the keyboard. If you think about it, before AIM and online chat (way before texting), people hardly ever faked their emotions so much. I mean, you could fake a small laugh, but you didn't outright say that you're rolling on the floor laughing, while you weren't even cracking a smile physically. That would be impossible over the phone, and AFAIK people didn't do it over email, either. It's a product of the instant-message culture. And it also symbolizes the disconnect between the online persona on facebook, posting all those cool photos, and the real-world person sitting by the computer all those lonely nights. The emotions and the fulfillment of the emotions have become stilted, computers now provide a superstimulus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus) that replaces deep, real-life conversations with a steady stream shallow online interactions. Notifications pull us back in for more like an addictive slot machine. And our kids are ill-equipped to fight it, which is why they spend a great deal of their lives addicted to effectively meaningless communication with people who are not next to them: http://www.buzzfeed.com/benrosen/how-to-snapchat-like-the-teens http://www.buzzfeed.com/benrosen/how-to-snapchat-like-the-te...
- jgrahamc 11y ago
  If you think about it, before AIM and online chat (way before texting), people hardly ever faked their emotions so much In the late 1980s terms like LOL were used on BBSes and on Usenet. Perhaps you just aren't old enough to remember that? :-)
  - bdreadz 11y ago
    Thank you. On BBSes and even IRC /me laughs, /me <action|emotion> Before LOL I'd use hahaha or hehehe all the time as well in IRC, Chat Rooms, BBSes, etc.
    - Tiksi 11y ago
      * Tiksi slaps bdreadz around a bit with a large trout. I remember reading a study that people laugh more around other people. Anecdotally, I can definitely see this in myself. If I find something funny that isn't shared with other people, I might not outwardly laugh, and it would look like my lol, rofl, hahaha, etc isn't genuine, but with a group of people I'd probably be laughing out loud at the same thing. It might just be expressing the same emotion differently.
gaur 11y ago
> I already speak a language (English) which is some bastard child of French, German, Dutch, Arabic, etc. It's a Germanic language (not a child of German), with significant lexical input from French and Latin. The input from "Dutch, Arabic, etc." is minor.
- tremon 11y ago
  But the Germanic language family is quite large; it basically describes every language spoken on the Northern Atlantic coast. You can't say "it's Germanic" and then say "it's hardly related to Dutch or German". As for the development of the English language, I believe it derives mostly from Saxon - Frisian - Norse - French, in chronological order. I'm pretty sure Celtic should also be on that list, but I don't know in what order or to what extent.
  - JetSetWilly 11y ago
    English and Dutch are similar because they share a common ancestor. But the direct influence of Dutch upon English is minimal. Relatedness and Influence are distinct concepts, the language that influenced English was an ancestor of both Dutch and English, and so the influence of Dutch itself on English has been small compared to other languages like French.
  - gaur 11y ago
    > You can't say "it's Germanic" and then say "it's hardly related to Dutch or German". That's not what I said. I said "it's Germanic" and "it's not a child of German or Dutch".
jonstokes 11y ago
Gahh.. I actually don't have anything against emojis, and I use them, too. I probably agree with 90% of the pro-emojii sentiment in this sub-thread. The emoji thing was a bad analogy and I should have just left out that clause entirely and started that sentence some other way.
madaxe_again 11y ago
Indeed. I actually find the fact that we've come full circle and are going back to ideograms rather fascinating. If anything, see Japanese - Kanji are essentially ancient Chinese emoticons, which succinctly express common notions which would be far more expansive in katakana or hiragana. I can't read the latter, but I can read Kanji - which gets me by in both China and Japan. Emoticons are even more universal.
notahacker 11y ago
Using emojis (and acronyms, abbreviations and even to some extent memes) to augment conversation isn't the problem. Using them in such a random or repetitive way that they substitute for conversation - to the extent that some human interactions would struggle to pass a Turing test - is the problem. Twitter, where the bot feeds are often indistinguishable from the human ones, is pretty much the poster child for this sort of communication malaise.

KaiserPro 11y ago

emoticons were annoying on MSN messenger. I'd hope that people will grow out of it, like they did back then. but perhaps they are here to stay.

cazum 11y ago
I don't think MSN users grew out of emoticons, they just stopped using MSN. Facebook chat, Skype and SMS picked up where MSN left off, and all three of those have a strong emoticon game.
- KaiserPro 11y ago
  interesting, first it appears people really love emojis here, my original post lost me some karma... second there was a massive gap in my friend group between MSN emoticons dieing out and emojis seeping in. Perhaps my experiences are abnormal....
freehunter 11y ago
I don't think they'll ever go away, and that's because of the nature of short-form text communications. You need to express emotion, something language is bad at doing in short-form. Longer expressions can have great flowery emotion, but "im gonna kill you" can mean a lot of different things depending on the emoticon or emoji that follows it. And that's really important. Some people write long messages to convey emotion. Others use ambiguous phrases and follow it up with a quick expression of emotion to set the context.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

zkhalique 11y ago

Emojis are fine. But I remember the first times I started seeing "LOL" and "ROTFLMAO". And I realized that the person wasn't really laughing, but they were quietly typing that on the keyboard. If you think about it, before AIM and online chat (way before texting), people hardly ever faked their emotions so much. I mean, you could fake a small laugh, but you didn't outright say that you're rolling on the floor laughing, while you weren't even cracking a smile physically. That would be impossible over the phone, and AFAIK people didn't do it over email, either. It's a product of the instant-message culture. And it also symbolizes the disconnect between the online persona on facebook, posting all those cool photos, and the real-world person sitting by the computer all those lonely nights. The emotions and the fulfillment of the emotions have become stilted, computers now provide a superstimulus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus) that replaces deep, real-life conversations with a steady stream shallow online interactions. Notifications pull us back in for more like an addictive slot machine. And our kids are ill-equipped to fight it, which is why they spend a great deal of their lives addicted to effectively meaningless communication with people who are not next to them: http://www.buzzfeed.com/benrosen/how-to-snapchat-like-the-teens http://www.buzzfeed.com/benrosen/how-to-snapchat-like-the-te...

jgrahamc 11y ago
If you think about it, before AIM and online chat (way before texting), people hardly ever faked their emotions so much In the late 1980s terms like LOL were used on BBSes and on Usenet. Perhaps you just aren't old enough to remember that? :-)
- bdreadz 11y ago
  Thank you. On BBSes and even IRC /me laughs, /me <action|emotion> Before LOL I'd use hahaha or hehehe all the time as well in IRC, Chat Rooms, BBSes, etc.
  - Tiksi 11y ago
    * Tiksi slaps bdreadz around a bit with a large trout. I remember reading a study that people laugh more around other people. Anecdotally, I can definitely see this in myself. If I find something funny that isn't shared with other people, I might not outwardly laugh, and it would look like my lol, rofl, hahaha, etc isn't genuine, but with a group of people I'd probably be laughing out loud at the same thing. It might just be expressing the same emotion differently.

gaur 11y ago

> I already speak a language (English) which is some bastard child of French, German, Dutch, Arabic, etc. It's a Germanic language (not a child of German), with significant lexical input from French and Latin. The input from "Dutch, Arabic, etc." is minor.

tremon 11y ago
But the Germanic language family is quite large; it basically describes every language spoken on the Northern Atlantic coast. You can't say "it's Germanic" and then say "it's hardly related to Dutch or German". As for the development of the English language, I believe it derives mostly from Saxon - Frisian - Norse - French, in chronological order. I'm pretty sure Celtic should also be on that list, but I don't know in what order or to what extent.
- JetSetWilly 11y ago
  English and Dutch are similar because they share a common ancestor. But the direct influence of Dutch upon English is minimal. Relatedness and Influence are distinct concepts, the language that influenced English was an ancestor of both Dutch and English, and so the influence of Dutch itself on English has been small compared to other languages like French.
- gaur 11y ago
  > You can't say "it's Germanic" and then say "it's hardly related to Dutch or German". That's not what I said. I said "it's Germanic" and "it's not a child of German or Dutch".

jonstokes 11y ago

Gahh.. I actually don't have anything against emojis, and I use them, too. I probably agree with 90% of the pro-emojii sentiment in this sub-thread. The emoji thing was a bad analogy and I should have just left out that clause entirely and started that sentence some other way.

madaxe_again 11y ago

Indeed. I actually find the fact that we've come full circle and are going back to ideograms rather fascinating. If anything, see Japanese - Kanji are essentially ancient Chinese emoticons, which succinctly express common notions which would be far more expansive in katakana or hiragana. I can't read the latter, but I can read Kanji - which gets me by in both China and Japan. Emoticons are even more universal.

notahacker 11y ago

Using emojis (and acronyms, abbreviations and even to some extent memes) to augment conversation isn't the problem. Using them in such a random or repetitive way that they substitute for conversation - to the extent that some human interactions would struggle to pass a Turing test - is the problem. Twitter, where the bot feeds are often indistinguishable from the human ones, is pretty much the poster child for this sort of communication malaise.