[dropcap]I[/dropcap]t’s that glorious time of the year when the ‘best of’ lists begin, and (insert generic noun here) of the year are announced. As a lover of year-end lists created by groups of people arbitrarily deciding what singular thing best captures a year, I can’t help but feel as though Christmas has come early.
So when the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) announced their choice for word of the year I was definitely intrigued, though I will admit that my hopes were not very high, as previous words of the year have been “vape” in 2014 and “selfie” in 2013. But with this year’s announcement I wasn’t so much disappointed as I was surprised.
The OED word of the year is “face with tears of joy.” This isn’t even a word — it is an emoji.
Now, for some people the idea of replacing a word with an image is sacrilegious. A word is a word, not an emoji. A word is composed of a combination of letters from the 26 in the English alphabet, not a little yellow face that may be misused by your mother in a text message.
Though, as someone who has managed to have conversations using only emojis, Oxford’s choice does make sense to me, on some levels. I realize that each year’s ‘word’ documents the evolution of language, and past announcements of more colloquial words have helped log this evolution.
However, if the OED really wanted to capture the language’s evolution by immortalizing an emoji as the word of the year, they should have picked either the eggplant, peach, or ‘splashing sweat symbol.’ Because with our sex-obsessed culture in 2015, too many have sent these as a way to solicit sex without actually having to say, “hey, lets have sex.”
But on other levels I am disappointed. We now live in an age where “your” and “you’re” are practically interchangeable, and the Internet has me questioning whether “breathe” is actually supposed to end with an “e.” Each year, the OED has the opportunity to help educate a public that at certain times clearly needs it. Yet they squander this opportunity by declaring an emoji as word of the year.
Granted, the other contenders for word of the year were not as interesting or surprising — “face with tears of joy” beat out ‘ad blocker,’ ‘Brexit’ (a term for the potential or hypothetical exit of the UK from the EU), ‘dark web,’ ‘on fleek,’ ‘lumbersexual,’ ‘refugee,’ ‘sharing economy,’ and ‘they’ (singular) — used as a pronoun to refer to a person of an unspecified gender.
Overall, an emoji as word of the year opens up debate on to what even constitutes a ‘word.’ But, when in doubt, we can remember that Ancient Egyptians used hieroglyphs, and those were just words in picture form. So, maybe we are just getting to a point where using pictures to communicate is more efficient than using letters to make words.
