• Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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    2 months ago

    You’ve got two generations present.

    One for whom emoji happened well into adulthood, and they start tacking them on awkwardly and redundantly.

    One for whom emoji has always been almost as accessible as the latin alphabet, and touchscreen keyboards are so shit that emoji themselves become slang for concepts that they’re only obliquely related to.

        • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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          2 months ago

          Emoji have done something that emoticons never did: Emoji have become hieroglyphs.

          :) :o :D XD This tells the story of a happy person being surprised and then starting to laugh. Emoticons were crude depictions of facial expressions and never took on abstract meanings beyond those.

          Emoji, partially because a lot of them are Japanese, are badly designed. On most systems I’ve seen Emoji on, they’re too small and the details are too fine to really make them out. There’s 1,000 facial expression ones, all of them are mostly just yellow circles. Why does there have to be a slightly frowning and a frowning face? Why do we have “woozy” and “dizzy” as separate glyphs? 😵‍💫 Which of the two is that? Trick question, neither, that’s “face with spiral eyes.” Emoji are stage IV emoticon cancer. So teh youthz don’t actually use the facial expression ones, they use a skull for laughing, because that one is white and easy to tell apart. Apparently the etymology is “died/dying laughing.”

          Trying it on Lemmy’s emoji selector, “skull” and “death” both return the skull emoji, but “laugh” or “funny” doesn’t. So the skull emoji, along with others, are like hieroglyphs. They’ve taken on abstract indirect meanings of their own independent of what the glyph literally means.

          • Dragon Rider (drag)@lemmy.nz
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            2 months ago

            The skull emoji also signifies deadpan delivery of a joke. Because the skull is incapable of showing emotion, the skull represents a falsely blank expression.

            I forgor 💀

          • SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org
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            2 months ago

            Damn gramps, you have some strong opinions on a bunch of little pictures. Weird hill to die on. I imagine this just is the most important thing in your life, so you care about it a lot.

            • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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              2 months ago

              You are probably one of those freaks that feels like local flags do not have to follow the rules of vexiology. You’re basically an animal.

              Go back to living in your Non-Standardized cave. I bet you don’t even know what the ISO is, your people discussed me.

    • Daemon Silverstein@thelemmy.club
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      2 months ago

      Yes. And there’s a younger generation (Gen Alpha) using slangs such as “👁️👄👁️” as a synonym for “😮” (if I understood correctly, because I’m not Alpha, I’m Zennial).

      • alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml
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        2 months ago

        From what I’ve seen, 👁️👄👁️ is more like “focused on watching this”, but I’m even older, so maybe I’m misunderstanding.