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The Oxford Dictionaries has selected their 2015 "word of the year" and it's an Emoji.
When I heard this my first thought was no way, but the link verifies the choice. Not sure how much that bothers me ... I mean, it's a symbol in widespread use that has a clear and unambiguous meaning. Can't really argue that "tears of joy" is any different, except for the choice of symbols. Still, something bothers me about this unprecedented entry.
I haven't encountered it all that much, and I don't find clear and unambiguous. Having myself experienced helpless, uncontrollable, weeping laughter even in the face of utmost despair, I don't get the joy component. Oxford says this thing is "officially called the ‘Face with Tears of Joy’ emoji," but doesn't say who makes it official, nor do they give us a clue how one would look it up, should they decided to list it in their dictionaries.
I assume the "official" name of an emoji would be the one its creator bestowed upon it.
I've never run across an article listing emojis, and telling how to enter them in a tweet. Is there a Char Map app in Win 10 for emojis, or do you enter a number while holding doen the Alt key, or what?
Cute youtube on the page Heimhenge linked to!
I look forward to selections in future years, when the Word of the Year will be, in turn: A Single Unexpected Open-Mouth Hiccup, The Color of Butter That Has Gone Slightly Off, The Sound of Letting Air Out of A Balloon, The Smell of Burning Electrical Insulation, and The Sudden Jerk That Occurs Just As You're About to Fall Asleep.
Ron Draney said
The Color of Butter That Has Gone Slightly Off
Fritz Brenner cooks eggs in brown butter for Nero Wolfe and Archie Griffith. Archie raves, and I'd like to try them, but I'd like to try them first when they are made by someone who knows what they're supposed to taste like. I've fried eggs in hamburger grease that's turned a little brown, and of course, in bacon drippings, and they look terrible but taste great, so I think I'd love œufs frits dans le beurre brun.
Not sure how to look up the taste and smell in the dictiomary, though.
deaconB said: Not sure how to look up the taste and smell in the dictionary, though.
Maybe a thesaurus would work better. You could start with a close approximation, like "spoiled" or "rancid" and maybe get lucky. Or maybe the dictionary should include a "scratch and sniff/taste" appendix? 🙂
Did anyone else who read that Oxford article notice that "they" is now an acceptable substitute for "he or she" or "he/she"? See "The Word of the Year Short List" about halfway down the page. I've been using "they" that way for years, and have occasionally been corrected by editors for doing it. But now it's finally legit. In your face editors! I never did like the awkward structure of that "he or she" contrivance. A victory for simplicity driven by popular usage. Now all we need to do is wait for the style guides to catch up.
Heimhenge said
Did anyone else who read that Oxford article notice that "they" is now an acceptable substitute for "he or she" or "he/she"? See "The Word of the Year Short List" about halfway down the page. I've been using "they" that way for years, and have occasionally been corrected by editors for doing it. But now it's finally legit. In your face editors! I never did like the awkward structure of that "he or she" contrivance. A victory for simplicity driven by popular usage. Now all we need to do is wait for the style guides to catch up.
If an actor can be either male or female, but an actress is limited to being female, and man can be either gender, but woman is only female, I see no reason why he is not an acceptable pronoun for a person of unknown gender.
But "they" has been used to mean singular or plural, male or female, since the 1300s (the word they first appeared in the 1200s as a plural.) Check out Canterbury Tales! Shakespeare, Defoe, Swift, Fielding, Richardson, Goldsmith and Johnson all made great use of the sexless numberless "they/them/their" without raising eyebrows. It wasn't until the end of the 18th century that eyebrows were raised. (Semiquote from "Origins of the Specious" by Patricia T O'Connor)
I've always used he, rather than they or he/she, because of Johnson's Rule: "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money." People I was selling to were taught to use he by their 8th-grade spinster English teacher. Twain said clothes make the man; naked people have little or no influence on society, and I've noticed that feminists don't, either.
Ron Draney said
I look forward to selections in future years, when the Word of the Year will be, in turn: A Single Unexpected Open-Mouth Hiccup, The Color of Butter That Has Gone Slightly Off, The Sound of Letting Air Out of A Balloon, The Smell of Burning Electrical Insulation, and The Sudden Jerk That Occurs Just As You're About to Fall Asleep.
Well there's a phrase that covers the first and last: myoclonic jerk- the latter is also called a hypnic jerk. The sound of air leaving a balloon is sort of a bilabial trill and Bob Vila says calls it a "strange fish smell" coming from a burning electrical outlet or wire.
Benjamin-Moore (paints) has a shade called simply "butter" so there's hope there. But, who knew?- they now add coloring to butter. See this: http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2011/09/22/the-politics-of-yellow/
Wherein we find that margarine has been oppressed!
"Over time, as supply and demand for butter and margarine ebbed and flowed alongside federal rules and penalizing taxes on margarine, the popularity of each ebbed and flowed too. Then, in 1950, margarine was apparently the “the talk of the country” and President Truman put an end to the oppression of margarine, in part because the National Association of Margarine Manufacturers had begun to build enough power to compete with dairy associations. Wisconsin, the cheese state, was the last anti-margarine state hold out (till 1967), but it continued to forbid margarine in public places (unless requested; as of Sept. 2011).
By 1957, sales of margarine exceeded those of butter. Margarine still outsells butter today. And, in a bizarre reversal, butter manufacturers now regularly dye butter yellow."
faresomeness said: ... Bob Vila says calls it a “strange fish smell” coming from a burning electrical outlet or wire.
I would have to disagree with Vila on that, unless he was talking about some particular species of fish I've never smelled. I've done a lot of electrical and electronics work, and know that odor well (unfortunately). I really can't say it's comparable to anything else but I instantly recognize it when I smell it. If I had to compare it to something, the closest I could get would be "burning rubber" or maybe "burning plastic" ... it's kinda tough to pin down.
faresomeness said
Wherein we find that margarine has been oppressed!
Mamma used to talk of margarine coming with little packets you had to stir in to have yellow margarine, and how happy she was that they legalized colored margarine.
The margarine folks won the battle over naming. If you are nutritionally equal to a food with a standard of identity, such as butter, you're to identify yourself as "imitation whatever" but the dairy folk insisted, so that they couldn't use the word "butter", so they came up with "oleomargarine" which later became margarine. Later on, the dairy folk realized that was a goof, because the word "imitation" would have hurt then, but calling it margarine labels it as a product of its own, instead of a wannabee.
The fish industry took note and has fought against calling "sea legs" and similar products "surimi". Surimi is a mix of whitefish and crabmeat sucked out of claws, etc. There are something like 10,000 forms of surimi in Asia, but as "imitation crabmeat", it hasn't really gotten much of a foothold here.
As far as the war on margarine goes, they can't serve it in NYC restaurants any more, and most brands have gone off supermarket shelves. Margarine is 80% fat, and in order to form sticks, they have to hydrogenate the vegetable oils, which inevitably forms trans fats. That's nasty stuff that drives up insurance costs. Spreads, which are less than 80% fat, are sold in liquid or soft forms, and don't have to be hydrogenated. (Writers tend to have a lot of other jobs along the while. I played a very minor role in developing "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter" when Mrs. Filberts was owned by Central Soya about 35 years ago.)
Unworthy of a thread of its own department:
I learned tonight that "chivvy" comes from Chevy Chase, a song about a scottish battle. I thought "chase" was a geographic feature, but it turns out that a chevy chase is a fox hunt, with the dogs hounding the fox, which is why to chivvy is to hound. So one shouldn't drive his Chevu to the levee, he should drive it to the fox. Today is International Men's Day, so I ask, if a man is alone in the woods on a fox hunt and there is nobody there to hear him, is he still wrong? Not that vixen are prone to chivvy men, of course.
Now that they are all over everywhichway you look, it occurs to me I had never thought of using emojis. Not even the predecessor kind made up of typed characters.
I wonder if it won't be long before some psychologist will be expounding on issues of how often you resort to emojis.
Maybe emoji-averse people will be diagnosed with perhaps linguistic autism, for being neglectful of the advantages of that imaginary 'body language.' On the other hand, at the opposite end of the spectrum, the emoji-maniacs will be named for being that kind of 'mental' too.
Where in the spectrum are you?
Now it is kind of interesting, that the Japanese people, from whose language the word emoji stems, are not particularly known for facial expressiveness at all. (As you might judge from the Samurai movies.) The psychologists might make something of that.
Martha Barnette
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