From Print to Pixels
– Gargee Dixit,
SY BSc. Economics (2023-27)
Estimated Reading time ~ 4 mins
Source: Pinterest
Welcome to another edition of “Gargee’s chronically online chronicles”. In today’s globalised world where the majority of our communication happens on text, it’s very interesting to see how language evolves different characteristics to suit our needs. With the advent of social media, and the increased communication over blogs and written media, a whole generation shifted to another medium. Our previous generations exclusively used phones or verbal communication. One advantage of verbal communication is that we can decipher tones based on it. The content is a part of the message, but how you deliver it makes or breaks the interpretation. This is particularly hard in written media, where there are no tonal indicators. If we assume everyone is always serious and sincere, the texts are dry. The tone is especially hard to decipher with direct written communication via text messages.
To address this particular question of tone, in 1580s, when the printing press had just taken off, Henry Denham, had suggested the use of percontation mark (or inverted question mark ‘?’) to denote rhetorical questions. Even an inverted exclamation mark! was suggested for the use of irony. But things like these never stuck because of the costs associated with installing other symbols to denote tone.
Interesting tidbit but in the mid 1800s, people used to place stamps in different places on the mail envelope to denote tone and hidden messages like a stamp on the bottom left corner meant “I will never forget you” or on the bottom right corner meant “write soon”. It was sadly discontinued because it was harder to streamline the mail this way and work with it.
When the age of the internet started and people were primarily thrusted upon the written media, they came up with interesting “tone tags” that conveyed the meaning behind the written material like /hj which meant half joking, /j = joking, /srs= serious. This linguistic device was and is so important that I still use these today when I don’t want to use emojis.
And now we come to the star of the show. Emojis. From your grandmother abusing the rose emoji during her daily good morning message or your friend spamming the skull emoji to no end. Everyone uses emojis. But that doesn’t mean they do it the right way. I’m kidding. There is no right or wrong way of using emojis, but that’s what makes this tonal tag characteristic so interesting.
Usually when we learn about a grammatical tool, it has defined rules and uncountable exceptions. But it is predefined. With tonal tags however, the world is your oyster. It is almost like an art of sorts. You’ve to balance many different meanings and interpretations of the same pixels. Different age groups, different generations, even different internet corners have different interpretations of emojis. For me personally the funniest and jarring example of this is the straight laughing emoji. In my chronically online era, I use the laughing emoji to denote “I’m going off the rails” or “this is so jarring it’s not even funny”. Essentially ironic. And that’s how most of my friends communicated with each other. But in Gokhale it’s a different story. Almost everyone I text uses it unironically. I don’t know if it’s because they aren’t as chronically online as me or just run in different circles. But I painstakingly had to rewire my texting style to use more laughing emojis and exclamation marks sincerely. I’m not saying that it’s bad, it’s just different and interesting.
Henry tried to standardise the tone tags to no avail. And even now when there’s no real cost to having a standard set of emojis, we still use it in different ways. And that is the beauty of language and communication
Aside from “language” papers, people forget that language and communication are subjective in real life. There is a reason why people prefer to have serious conversations in real life. The risk of being misinterpreted is just too high. The body language and tone help us eliminate subjectivity which is prevalent in the written text. The ambiguity of written text is why we have the “the curtains were blue” meme. Language is a tool that we can mould to whatever we want, just enough people have to believe in it. A very funny example is that William Shakespeare actually made up a lot of words in his literature, and we still use them today. Recent examples include “brain rot” terms like “rizz”, “skibidi”, “maxxing” etc, which for some are useless looney toons words which hold no real meaning, but for younger generations they are an effective form of communication.
Emojis, a part of our ‘online’ language, are annoyingly fickle. We can’t really force people to adhere to the ‘rules’ even if we try to come up with a standardised notation. Many people still use the emojis as they were intended to. For example- the thumbs up emoji is not a passive aggressive way to end the conversation (shocking right). But there are people like me, who use it in their niche ways and confuse the hell out of some older generations.
These emojis are a part of the new generation’s life. Gen-Z is the first generation who grew up entirely online and had to navigate the benefits and perils that the internet offers. For better or for worse, we are stuck in this ever-increasing online ambiguity. We are constantly bombarded with new conventions, and it seems like every week we are thrusted into new trendier alternatives for a simple laughing emoji. My hypothesis is that as we keep thrusting forward, we will end up going backwards, using ‘:)’ to denote sincerity when all emojis fail. 😉