I’m generally skeptical of corporate-storytelling advice, but Andy Raskin’s “How to Design Your Company Story” is just wacky enough – its hypothetical company is called FairyGodmothers.com – to win me over.
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An illustrated guide to Republican metaphors for the Affordable Care Act, from goat to puzzle to house of sand.
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There’s going to be a sweary-face emoji. (Hat tip: Ben Zimmer.)
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At its annual meeting, held this year in Austin, the American Dialect Society selected a two-word lexical item as its word of the year for 2016: dumpster fire. And it set a precedent by including an emoji representation of the term in its announcement of the vote.
Yes, that’s a wastebasket, not a dumpster. More about that later.
For a full list of nominees and winners, see the ADS press release.
Why dumpster fire? “As 2016 unfolded, many people latched on to dumpster fire as a colorful, evocative expression to verbalize their feelings that the year was shaping up to be a catastrophic one,” Ben Zimmer, chairman of the society's new words committee, said in the press release. “In pessimistic times, dumpster fire served as a darkly humorous summation of how many viewed the year’s events.”
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With 8 percent of 2015 still in the mysterious future, the first Word of the Year (WOTY) nominations have already begun. Oxford Dictionaries made history, and stirred up some controversy, by selecting an emoji – “Face with Tears of Joy” – as its, um, lexical unit of the year. (Emoji was a Fritinancy Word of the Week in January 2012.)
And at the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Lingua Franca blog, Allan Metcalf – he’s the executive secretary of the American Dialect Society – makes the case for basic: “the word this year to describe someone or something that fits a stereotype, especially the ‘basic white girl’.”
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Emoji: Cartoonish icons used to communicate emotion in email and texting. From the Japanese; a blend of “e” (Japanese for “picture”) + “moji” (“letter”).
Some of the emoji icons available on Apple devices.
Think of emoji as the lazy person’s emoticons: no careful combinations of parentheses, semicolons, and carats; no tilting your head to puzzle them out. Or think of them as hieroglyphics for the global postliterate era.
In an article about emoji published last month in the New York Times, reporter Jenna Wortham provided some background:
Emoji have long been popular among cellphone users in Asia. They first emerged in Japan in the 1990s, said Mimi Ito, a cultural anthropologist at the University of California, Irvine, who studies how young people use digital media in Japan and the United States. Cellphone carriers first added the images to differentiate their phones from those of rivals, and they caught on as an efficient way to quickly convey a specific thought, mood or joke.
Since so many of our daily interactions are happening over mobile phones, it makes sense that people would crave new ways to convey meaning other than plain text, said S. Shyam Sundar, co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory at Pennsylvania State University.
“Text as a medium is particularly dull when it comes to expressing emotions,” Professor Sundar said. “Emoticons open the door a little, but emoji opens it even further. They play the role that nonverbal communication, like hand gestures, does in conversation but on a cellphone.”
Emoji are now standard on Apple devices running iOS 5. For the iPhone-deprived (or resistant), Gmail also offers an emoji keyboard in which some of the characters are animated. I’m still trying to figure out the context in which a pincer-wiggling lobster would express le mot juste.
I may need to enroll in Intro to Narratives in Emoji, a Tumblr of stories and movie plots distilled into emoji. Here, in its entirety, is Taxi Driver:
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