Alexander Larman
When did you, Spectator readers, last send an emoji in a text, DM or, gasp, email? I’ve just looked through the last messages I’ve sent and I sent a weeping smiley face to my wife last night while we were discussing Colin Firth’s singing in the film of Mamma Mia! (To be honest, anyone who has suffered through Firth murdering “My Last Summer” might use considerably stronger emojis than that.) Yet as a 44-year-old man, I can also concede that my own usage of emojis in my written communications is not as prevalent as that as my 10-year-old daughter Rose, who is an ardent user of them whenever she gets hold of my or her mother’s telephone. Unsurprisingly, given both her age and sense of humor, the poop emoji 💩 tends to be her favorite, closely followed by the wilting rose 🥀.
The combination of the two is one that her generation – Generation Alpha, or so they’re now called – might well relish, given the way that emojis and acronyms are rapidly replacing conventional speech. A recent survey by the New York Times, that bastion of down-with-Gen-Z-journalism, revealed that last year’s fastest-rising emojis, in terms of usage, include everything from the wilted flower – to denote sorrow or heartbreak – to, somewhat bizarrely, a crude version of the Moai statue 🗿, which is used, whether sincerely or ironically, to depict stoicism in the face of difficulty. Yet the most popular, as usual, are variants on the laughing-crying face 😂 😹, which are particularly prevalent in messages being used by teenage girls on whatever platforms they choose to communicate in. Well, it beats sending nudes on Snapchat, anyway.
