“W hat does the emoji without a mouth mean?” asked my grandmother who was taking baby steps in the techno-centric world via WhatsApp.
“Uhm… it means… well… the way you feel when…huh…”. I fumbled for the right words.
“Always fiddling with gadgets, and still doesn’t know it yet, my dear?” came the slightly annoyed response.
That got me thinking. So much for the praise of language as a medium of communication, doesn’t it have inherent barriers as well? I mean, most spoken English lessons advocate “thinking in English” to enable greater fluency in the language. Although I have been thinking in English since my childhood, long before I knew its importance, I find it a little funny now! How do you even think with words? The dark cave of our brain gets lit now and then by flashes of thought, in the form of images, mostly. As young learners we have all experienced that visual inputs tend to linger with us for a while longer than audio inputs. Even as we got older, we were advised to use colours in our handwritten notes than writing in monochromatic blue or black, in order to aid memory.
These are clear indicators of the limitations of language, if you’d call it that. Our online chatting sessions are greatly enlivened by the use of emoticons that are all the rage these days. There is no dearth of these emojis. There are even research institutes dedicated to studying their patterns of use. Nearly every known human experience and reaction has an electronic equivalent in the form of these cute emoticons that have evolved from simple smiley faces.
Looks like the Grammar Nazis are doomed, for more than punctuation marks, everyday folks now look out for emoticons at the end or between a text message to fully grasp the meaning that the sender implied (including sometimes sarcasm).
I am a fan of the memes generated online. I am amazed by the sheer frequency and quality of these instantaneous viral pieces of humour that are indeed the products of ingenious minds. A meme is all it takes today to lighten one’s mood and also importantly stay updated with the latest happenings. How many of us Googled “Who is Sonam Gupta” after the innumerable memes on the subject?
Have you ever wondered why these memes get so popular? As I have come to grasp it, they endear to us by their visual force and the straightforward injection of information to the mind by means of simple yet clever wordplay. Often the visual part wins us over and the brilliance of the meme-creator in comparing two apparently unrelated situations pushes all the right buttons for a hearty laugh.
Linguists all over the world are often worried of the death of the last speakers of a particular language. According to them, when a language dies, so does a whole culture. It has been estimated that by 2100, almost 90% of today’s spoken languages will be decimated and there will be one single tongue spoken by earthlings. While this news might get pro-globalisation enthusiasts excited, I feel neither the anxiety of the linguists nor the excitement of the globalists.
Heading back?
That language evolved from pictographic cave-markings is common knowledge. But what if we are headed back to square one all over again? What if all the learning we acquired through language will require unlearning by the replacement of images or visual data? After all, the purpose of language is communication, and as long as the receiving end gets the message, who really cares about the medium? Who wants to hear bombastic language when a simple image can capture an emotion?
So my dear grandma, my response to your question about the mouth-less emoji was right. Or maybe it was my Great Perhaps, as the poet Francois Rabelais said.
fidha.sherin@borngroup.com
