Emojis Make You More Human

Why are emojis so fun to use?

We’ve all used emojis. I’m not going to pretend that you’re savvy enough to find a fledgling blog, but somehow you’ve never figured out what the weird yellow emblems on your phone’s keyboard are. There’s the easy joke we’ve all made about emojis becoming a new language, or overtaking and destroying The Queen’s English, but I feel like it’s more interesting than that. It’s something worth genuinely exploring!

Let’s get the obvious comparison out of the way. Are emojis like hieroglyphs? No. Moving on

I’m kidding. But they really aren’t anything alike. Hieroglyphs are closer to the words you’re reading right now than emojis will probably ever be. Each hieroglyph stood for a sound, those sounds together made words, and those words together made sentences that conveyed specific meanings when put in a certain order. The same way c-a-t together make a word that brings to mind my sweet angel, Sunday. Honestly the mechanical workings of hieroglyphs are so similar to English you could treat it like the Katakana in Japanese. You could brute force the language and get something close enough to understand even though the writing system wasn’t built for that.

I know what you’re thinking, “sure, all of that is true and interesting, and I’m so grateful you pointed these things out. But I can do this: 😘😍💍. And you’d know I’m talking about someone i’m in love with!” And that’s why I’m so interested in emojis. Emojis masquerade as language, but I feel like emojis are closer to nonverbal communication. They’re a type of para-language in my eyes. Sure, they have the aesthetics of more direct communication. You can see them, you can “write” them out in whatever order you want, and when you see them they create an image in your head, right? But there’s a difference between “my cat Sunday is the most beautiful and perfect cat in the entire world” and “🐱😻😻🌍😤😤💪” The emojis are more nebulous, the pictures themselves represent something, sure, but when you put them in an order like you would with actual words it all quickly breaks down. What does “🙃” really mean? I love to use “❇️❇️💪 💪 ❇️❇️”but what am I really saying?

I think emojis are so compelling because they’re like the body language of the digital world. Looking at it this way settles much of the dispute pretty neatly. How is it not a language if I can communicate with it? The same way a shrug can add meaning to a sentence when you’re telling your partner about your day, but in a vacuum the shrug doesn’t really tell anybody anything. Emojis, as goofy as they are, enrich the world of digital communication! They’re absolutely incredible.

Gone are the days of having to use an “lol” you can 😂😂🤣🤣 and it gets the same idea across. Are you being sarcastic? 😉 Are you annoyed? 😒 Are you excited about tacos??? 🌮 🌮 🎶 🕺 It’s hard to pin down the syntax and semiotics of emojis, because it’s hard to do the same for every single way you can smile. It involves context and creativity, you’ve got to understand the person using the emojis, you need to feeeeel the emojis.

On their face (pun intended) emojis are goofy. There’s an emoji that’s a turd with eyeballs. But that turd can transform “I feel like crap” into something more visceral. When you “💩” the person you're messaging gets a better feel for your emotional state. Words can be evocative, a poem can make you cry, your friend’s wedding vows can give form to an oath. But sometimes they fail us, and a little unicode picture in the middle of a rant can be the now you need to wrap things up. As humans we’re hard wired to take in every little expression we make. Why did he end that text with a period? It took an hour to reply. This hug was too long. He touched his nose, is he lying? All of it. Emojis are just another part of this equation. What’s more human than a smile? 🤔 🤔🤔