Iconic Emotions!

There were times in life when you really wanted to express yourself with emotions and these emotions where manifested physically like stimulating the lachrymal glands to secrete tears or follow a complicated physiological process involving the cerebellum and the frontal lobe of the brain to stimulate laughter or simply a warm tight hug that felt good. In college we used to give each other a high five if any 2 of us had flunked the same number of papers those were emotions that showed sorrow, joy and the sharing of both.

The last few days I was hooked onto the new kid on the social networking block Whatsapp and got together with friends who parted ways 25 years back to form a group. We exchanged pleasantries, jokes, life and philosophy but I realised most of our conversations was ‘punctuated’ with funny looking shapes and it was the most intimidating part of the virtual reunion at least for a not so text savvy person like me. I’m not naïve and I know what a smiley is and incidentally that is the only emoticon that I know, the cute yellow chubby smiling stuff that you find everywhere. But what got me writing this piece is that after I cracked a wit in the group I get a smiley with an open mouth and tears and boy sure was I disappointed! I figured out later that it was a representation of laughing to the extent that causes tears!!!

Wiki defines an emoticon (/ɨˈmoʊtɨkɒn/) as a metacommunicative pictorial representation of a facial expression which in the absence of body language and prosody serves to draw a receiver's attention to the tenor or temper of a sender's nominal verbal communication, changing and improving its interpretation.

In short the two dimensional funny looking images that trace their roots to the humble punctuation marks that could make the likes of Shakespeare and co which includes my English teachers in school to turn in their graves at its fate. Emoticons were more an illegal off springs of English and Math in my opinion. How else do you think a colon that denotes a pause, separated from a parenthesis by a hyphen can end up representing a smiling face? Well I can live with simple stuff like that. There are some emotions that are ‘metacommunicatively’ communicated with complex special characters which I might not be able to express in flesh and blood. Do you know that an emotion as complex as ‘disappointed but relieved face’ can be expressed using an emoticon, give me a break, as a small experiment, all those who are reading this, please run to the nearest mirror and show the facial expression that denotes a disappointed but relieved face!!!!If it is anywhere close to this 😥 I will quit this blog of mine. I’m sure most of you will say that it looks exactly the same to save you the ordeals of having to read this time and again. There are even more complicated ones that denote an open mouth with cold sweat 😰, Open mouth I can understand but cold sweat? Well there are many more and I don’t want to look ignorant.

As though the metacomuunicative pictorial was not enough there were these set of abbreviated expressions to express emotions LOL, ROFL, ROFLMAO, LMAO. Growing up I have read the best of Wodehouse and other quality humour never have I rolled on the floor and laughed my ass off, had I done that I would have had a sore ass by now.

It’s ironic that I write this on the day Twitter went public with their IPO at NYSE and did fairly well. Though the emoticons and the abbreviated forms of expression where in use much earlier, thanks to Yahoo and Microsoft via their messengers that popularised it, Twitter was the one that created an entry barrier to expression of emotions via long prose by restricting the characters to 140. But why not, if a colon, a hyphen and a parenthesis which in all consists of just 3 characters can bring a smile to your face then you need not type the boring SMILE that uses up a precious 5 characters.

I’m on the lookout for a Rapidex guide to learn Emoticons in 30 day. Even if I lay my hands on one of them and master it, I would still prefer a warm hug or a palm reddening high five to the ROFLS, the LOLS and the confused cocktail of characters that mean nothing to me.

Emotions are to be expressed not represented.