Jay Doubleyou: this column will change your life
Uniting the world with emojis?
UK's fastest growing language is... emoji - BBC Newsbeat
But not everyone's happy:
Are Emoticons And Emojis Destroying Our Language? | Joan Gage
Emoji the big new language? I’d rather take to cave art
If we had to carve everything in stone there would be fewer face-covered-with-hands moments of embarrassment
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6:01AM BST 21 May 2015
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A friend sends me emails, and when I open them, butterflies flit about the screen. Better than moths, perhaps, but I am petrified that such electronic livestock will introduce viruses into my computer, like foxes bringing rabies through the Channel tunnel. So it was with an anxious heart that I read a news report that claimed emoji is the fastest growing language in Britain.
An emoji is not a cute creature from Star Wars like an Ewok (which does have a language of its own). Nor is an emoji the same as an emoticon. An emoticon is a portmanteau word combining emotion + icon, such as a smiley face or winking face (often a troublingly ambiguous hint). Emojis find their origin in e, the Japanese for "picture", and moji, "letter". They go beyond emotion. As well as shiny faces that gush shiny tears, emojis run to little pictures of guitars, aeroplanes, DVDs, bikinis, pills and cocktails with umbrellas in them. You begin to divine the sort of world we are dealing with.
Andy Murray tweets emojis ahead of his wedding
Andy Murray tweets emojis ahead of his wedding
I would like to say in a loud voice (without the aid even of an emoticon) that emojis do not make up a language and more than that they are a bad sign. By a “bad sign” I mean things like having Love and Hate tattooed on your knuckles or wearing a tie outside a sweater. To sport such things does not encourage, for example, an invitation to accompany your teenage children on a walking holiday.
There is, though, a silly claim that Moby-Dick has been translated into the emoji language, under the title Emoji Dick. The title is a good joke, but even one sentence from the novel (already disappointingly uphill work in English) is incomprehensible in emoji. It makes Finnegans Wake seem like a conversation between old friends. It would be easier to understand Moby-Dick translated into smoke-signals or written in tiny letters on the icing of a succession of cakes from Ulster bakers.
It’s a shame. I’d welcome instead a return to hieroglyphics carved in stone. Those beautiful Egyptian images repetitively depict pintail ducks or hands or owls, but are not usually about pintail ducks or hands or owls. Their great breakthrough was to use pictures to stand for sounds, and for elements of grammar.
If we had to carve everything in stone, or even paint hieroglyphs carefully on scrolls of papyrus, there would be fewer face-covered-with-hands moments of embarrassment when a hurried email, tweet or text has said the wrong thing to the right person or worse, a true thing to the wrong person.
Emojis follow a narrow path of easily encapsulated human interests. It is, I think, a proof of their inherent evilness that emojis are ready-made yet have such a repellent appearance. They are worse, in that respect, than Primark clothes or Ginster pasties. Those at least are made by human hand. You can never touch an emoji. It lives solely in the virtual aquarium of your glowing screen.
I should not be at all surprised if emojis shared the cursed status of the magic-lantern slides in M R James’s horror story Casting the Runes, one of which “showed a great mass of snakes, centipedes, and disgusting creatures with wings, and somehow or other made it seem as if they were climbing out of the picture and getting in among the audience; and this was accompanied by a sort of dry rustling noise”.
We’d be better off expressing ourselves like cavemen by drawing pictures on the wall with charcoal and ochre. No two of those pictures are the same. We are not quite sure what the bison and aurochs of Altamira and Lascaux mean – but have any expressive icons excelled them artistically in the 15,000 years or so since?
Back to language as we know it - and how to what extent words can or cannot express emotions:
From Schadenfreude to ringxiety: an encyclopedia of emotions
The sudden urge to kiss someone, the excitement of destroying something … many of these feelings you’ll have experienced without knowing they had a name
It is not always easy to put a name to an emotion. Some really do wash the world in a single colour, such as the terror felt as the car skids, or the euphoria of falling in love. Some are much harder to grasp. Plan a surprise for a loved one and you might feel anticipation crinkled with glee and creased at the edges with a faint terror – what if they hate it? There are emotions that slip quietly past, like a wisp of nostalgia. Others brood on the horizon and we hurry away from them fearing they will burst upon us – the jealousy that makes our fingers itch to search a loved one’s pockets, or the shame that can goad us into self‑destruction.
Sometimes it feels more as if we belong to our emotions, than they to us. But perhaps it’s only by paying attention to them that we can truly understand ourselves.
Over the centuries, many have tried to pin our unruly feelings down with lists and categories. The Li Chi, a book of Confucian precepts dating back to the first century BCE, suggests all men and women are born with seven core passions: joy, anger, sadness, fear, love, dislike and fondness. In our own time, evolutionary psychologists talk of “basic emotions” in a similar vein. These feelings – disgust, happiness, fear, sadness, anger and surprise are usually on the list – are thought to be universal, hardwired responses, protecting us from perils or encouraging us to seek safety in families and groups. Everyone experiences them in the same way, or so the theory claims: they are the building blocks out of which the fantastical architecture of our emotional lives is built.
On my travels, I’ve discovered emotions I recognised that I didn’t even know had names, such as Amae, which in Japan describes the feeling you get from surrendering to another in perfect safety; and others I didn’t even know existed, such as Acedia, a short-lived listless despair brought to the fourth-century desert monks by noonday demons. The diversity of the world’s emotional languages testifies to the fact that if we want to understand our feelings, we must look beyond brain states and neurochemistry. The way we feel is also profoundly influenced by the meanings we attribute to our emotions, meanings that drift across times and places. I offer this collection of emotions as a gesture against those arguments that try to reduce the beautiful complexity of our inner lives into just a handful of cardinal feelings. Because one thing I’ve learned is that we don’t need fewer words for our feelings. We need more.
Ambiguphobia
A term coined by the American novelist David Foster Wallace to describe feeling uncomfortable about leaving things open to interpretation. Eg: “His ambiguphobic recipe for yoghurted veal occupies seven pages and four schematic drawings.”
Anger
I don’t get angry, okay. I mean, I have a tendency to internalise … I grow a tumour instead” – Woody Allen, Manhattan.
You might think the idea that expressing anger is good for the health (better out than in!) is a modern one. Not so. Some medieval doctors encouraged their patients to unleash their fury.
The 11th-century Islamic scholar Ibn Butlan thought an angry outburst could invigorate the limbs, curing the bed-bound and paralysed. Two centuries later, the physician and alchemist Roger Bacon made an even more surprising claim. In his Cure of Old Age and Preservation of Youth, he argued that a good outburst of rage could slow the ageing process, since it warmed the body, countering the cooling effects of old age. Anger was thought to give that zest for life and a youthful glow.
Anticipation
It’s a tiny theft of pleasure, a reckless spending of delights not yet owned. Until the mid-19th century, an anticipation was a sum of money spent before it was earned: an early payout on the dowry; an advance on next week’s wages. Some emotions can be traced back to the weather (see: Gezelligheid) and others to the landscape. The “delicious agony” of anticipation, however, is firmly embedded in the history of economics and exchange. Perhaps it’s this whiff of the scandalous (“neither a borrower nor a lender be”) that makes savouring in Technicolor detail what will happen when the curtain goes up, or the present is unwrapped, such a pleasure – and makes anticipation such a risk.
Eg: “His ambiguphobic recipe for yoghurted veal occupies seven pages and four schematic drawings.
Awumbuk
There is an emptiness after visitors depart. The walls echo. The space which felt so cramped while they were here suddenly seems weirdly large. Sometimes everything feels a bit pointless. The indigenous Baining people who live in the mountains of Papua New Guinea are so familiar with this experience that they name it awumbuk. They believe departing visitors shed a kind of heaviness when they leave, so as to travel lightly. This oppressive mist hovers for three days, leaving everyone feeling distracted and apathetic. To counter it, the Baining fill a bowl with water and leave it overnight to absorb the festering air. The next day, the family rise very early and ceremonially fling the water into the trees, whereupon ordinary life resumes.
Basorexia
The sudden urge to kiss someone.
Boredom
Pick up a book, and discard it. Yawn, slump, and slip into a thousand-yard stare. Boredom is the most contrary of emotions. It’s a combination of feeling trapped, inert and uninterested: there is a vague sense of wanting something to change, but we really can’t say what.
The boredom we know today was invented by the Victorians. The word – from the French bourrer (to stuff or satiate; literally, to be fed up) – first appeared in the English language in Dickens’s Bleak House, published in 1853, amid public concern about the dangers of wasting time. From the late 18th century, the expansion of city factories and offices inaugurated a new portion of the day: “leisure time”. By the 19th century, leisure was conceived among the middle classes as a space for self-improving recreation. Victorian city dwellers delighted in science lectures and circuses, and a growing tourist industry took people on educational trips abroad. To find yourself at a loose end, or trapped in dreary company, or feeling inattentive or purposeless in such a context became a mark of general inadequacy. Doctors made boredom a medical complaint; politicians made it a moral one; and novelists of the age pointed out this emotion’s corrosive effects on middle- and upper-class women. Gwendolen in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda complains that women are brought up like hothouse plants to “look as pretty as we can, and be dull without complaining” – but their boredom could make them, like some exotic specimens, poisonous to the touch.
Today we have inherited the Victorians’ fear of boredom. Those who score highly on the Boredom Proneness Scale are thought more likely to die in a car accident, overeat or abuse drugs. But perhaps we should be careful not to fear this emotion too much. Turn off your smart phone, and you may find yourself slipping – via irritable boredom – into that listlessness which gives rise to pleasant reverie and daydreams. It’s when we feel the itch of dissatisfaction and indifference that we may be most motivated to change our situations, to invent and imagine. It could be, as the anthropologist Ralph Linton once argued, that “the human capacity for being bored, rather than social or natural needs, lies at the root of cultural advance”.
Cheerfulness
The emergence of cheerfulness as a workplace requirement can be traced back to the US, a country well known for embracing an upbeat, can-do attitude. Historians have found that the diaries and letters of 17th-century Americans are as miserable in tone as those of their European counterparts: humility, rather than a desire for change, seems to have been the appropriate response to life’s hardships. By the 19th century, however, deliberate cheerfulness and a constructive approach was increasingly encouraged.
Among the first modern “emotions workers” (the name sociologists give to those who are explicitly directed to control their feelings to influence those of other people) were American housewives. According to the Beecher Sisters’ 1869 housekeeping manual, women should bring a “patience and cheerfulness” to their homes.
In the 1920s, a new sort of specialist, the industrial psychologist, entered the workplace. Charged with preventing workplace unrest and increasing productivity, they concluded that optimism (rather than raised wages or better working conditions) was the critical factor. By the 1930s, 30% of American companies had departments to oversee the hiring process and test employees for “introversion” and other “temperament deficiencies”. It was against this backdrop of compulsory cheerfulness that Dale Carnegie wrote one of the classics of self-help literature, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, in 1948. He advised salesmen to be always “vivacious”, greeting clients with a cheery smile and cracking a joke. And if the salesman happened to be dissatisfied that day? Well, the solution was easy: “Think and act cheerful,” instructed Carnegie, “and you will be cheerful.”
Can trying to act upbeat when you don’t actually feel upbeat really work? There is some evidence from brain imaging studies done with women before and afterBotox treatments that more restrained facial expressions may well correspond to less emotional arousal in the brain. Presumably the converse may also be true: smile, and you may well find yourself feeling happier as a result.
But some psychologists and sociologists have questioned the long-term effects of sustaining a workplace rictus smile. In her study of flight attendants, sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild found that the cost of being “nicer than natural” to passengers over time was that the flight attendants grew more than usually tired, but also developed a feeling of being estranged from, even mistrustful of, their own feelings, in turn leaving them less resilient to coping with stress.
So it may be that the pressure to be cheerful leads to dissatisfaction, exhaustion and alienation. Have a nice day!
Exasperation
See Frustration
Formal feeling, a
Sometimes life’s most painful experiences can leave us eerily cold and a little mechanical. The poet Emily Dickinson described it as “a formal feeling”; the heart seems stiff and detached, our feelings wary and ceremonious. “This is the Hour of Lead,” wrote Dickinson. But she reassures us it too will pass. First there is a “Chill”, she wrote; “then Stupor – then the letting go – ”.
Frustration
See Exasperation
Gezelligheid
It’s no surprise that so many of northern Europe’s languages have a particular word for feeling cosy (from the Gaelic cosag, a small hole you can creep into). It’s when the rain is mizzling and the damp rising from the canals that we yearn for the feeling the Dutch call gezelligheid. Derived from the word for “friend”,gezelligheid describes both physical circumstances – being snug in a warm and homely place surrounded by good friends (it’s impossible to be gezelligheid alone) – and an emotional state of feeling “held” and comforted. The Danish hygge(cosiness), the German Gemütlichkeit, which describes feelings of congeniality and companionship, and the Finnish kodikas (roughly: homely) have similar connotations. Rifle through the languages of the sunny Mediterranean, however, and the equivalent combination of physical enclosure and emotional comfort is much harder to find.
Heebie-Jeebies, the
Like the jitters or the willies, the heebie-jeebies is a feeling of ghoulish apprehension.
Ilinx
There’s a peculiar exhilaration in intentionally smashing a delicate china cup. Or in standing on a kitchen chair and tipping out a bag of marbles so that they crash, bounce and roll across the floor. According to the 20th-century French sociologist Roger Caillois, the “strange excitement” of wanton destruction was one way of experiencing the feeling he named ilinx(from the Greek word for whirlpool). He defined ilinx as a “voluptuous panic”, a sensation of spinning, falling and losing control – the sort of feeling roller coasters bring. Callois traced ilinxback to the practices of ancient mystics who by whirling and dancing hoped to induce rapturous trance states and glimpse alternative realities). Today, even the urge to create a minor chaos by kicking over the office recycling bin should give you a mild hit.
Joy
Your breathing becomes shallow, as if the lungs are being squeezed. Your eyes gleam. The cheek muscles stretch the face into the hugest of smiles. There’s the urge to fling open the arms, to clap them together. To sweep up the nearest person in a dance. The knees may buckle, there may be tears, too. Either way, joy can be a kind of violence, and always a surprise.
From the Old French joie (a jewel), this is an emotion that dazzles us into submission. It feels, as Katherine Mansfield put it in her story “Bliss”, “as though you’d suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks into every particle, into every finger and toe”.
One of the great definitions of joy comes from the 17th-century philosopherBaruch Spinoza. A Jew banished from his religious community, he was condemned to wander around Holland without a family or home, earning a living as a lens grinder. Believing our lives were fundamentally beyond our control, Spinoza linked joyfulness to the accidental and unforeseen. It surges up when something is better than we can possibly have imagined. “Joy is pleasure accompanied by the idea of something past, which has had an issue beyond our hope.”
The philosophers of the following century were more interested in understanding happiness as something to be self-orchestrated and pursued consciously, rather than giddy, unpredictable joy. We still suffer the effects of this interest in happiness as an achievable goal. By contrast, joy has managed to protect its links with pleasures discovered rather than made. Humility, gratitude and wonder – rather than pride and satisfaction – are its closest companions.
The flipside of course, is how quickly it vanishes…
Mono no aware
Murasaki Shikibu, a poet and lady-in-waiting in 12th-century Japan, crafted what is often described today as the world’s first novel, The Tale of Genji. Set in the imperial court, it recounts the political intrigues and love affairs of an emperor’s illegitimate son. The book is infused with a quiet feeling for life’s transience, a sensitivity to the beauty of decay and the fading of all living and inanimate things. To read it is to become well acquainted with the feeling the Japanese callmono no aware. Literally translated as the pathos (aware) of things (mono), it is often described as a kind of a sigh for the impermanence of life.
Nostalgia
The feelings associated with reminiscing are both warm and melancholic, often “bittersweet”.
Less than a hundred years ago, however, a sigh of nostalgic reverie could actually kill you.
In the middle of the 17th century, a strange new illness was seen to be sweeping Europe, afflicting those far from home – soldiers, students and travellers. The illness was dubbed Nostalgia (from the Greek nostos – a homecoming – and algos – pain). Provoked by strong memories of far-away home, its symptoms included inertia, loss of appetite, delirium, pustules and sores, and in some cases, death by wasting. By the 19th century the illness became one of the most studied conditions in Europe, and during the American civil war, 5,000 Unionists had been diagnosed and sent home – its only known cure. The last person to die of Nostalgia was a US soldier fighting in the first world war.
In the early 20th century the meaning of nostalgia drifted to a yearning for things past, while homesickness itself also began to be taken less seriously, perhaps as a result of modernity’s restless commitment to travel and progress.
Today, nostalgic reveries are wistful but rapturous travels in time, to smells and songs and images that send us spinning off down rabbit-holes into our former lives. Too much nostalgia can leave you stuck between a dissatisfying present and an alluringly unavailable past. But often making a sudden connection with a long-lost memory creates welcome feelings of belonging, identity and continuity. For this reason, some psychologists emphasise the benefits of indulging in nostalgic reflection, suggesting it increases our sense of existential meaning and social connectedness. Psychologist Clay Routledge has even proposed “nostalgia workouts”, such as reading old letters or making a list of cherished memories, to combat anxiety, loneliness and rootlessness. And in southern China, a team of researchers have noticed that nostalgic feelings are more common in colder weather, arguing that reminiscing may serve an evolutionary purpose by raising our body temperature – quite literally, heart-warming.
From deadly disease to health-giving pastime in less than a century: nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.
Pronoia
A strange, creeping feeling that everyone is out to help you.
Ringxiety
A phone trills in a crowded train carriage, and you frantically rummage for yours. Out on a country walk you whip out your phone like a gun from a holster, convinced you’ve felt it vibrate, only to discover a pathetically blank screen. According to the psychologist David Laramie, who coined the term, ringxiety is a feeling of low-level anxiety causing us to think we’ve heard our phones ring, even when they haven’t. Evidence – as if we needed any more – that in this age of instant communication, being in a state of readiness for human contact is fast becoming a default setting.
Schadenfreude
The unexpected thrill we feel at another’s misfortune is a deliciously clandestine human pleasure. Sure, we put on our best sad face when our infuriatingly attractive friend gets dumped. But behind the commiserations, there’s just a little pulse of excitement, making our eyes gleam and the corners of our mouths twitch.
The Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius believed delighting in another’s struggle was not a sign of moral bankruptcy. We enjoy standing safely on the shore watching a boat tossed about on a stormy sea, he wrote, because “it is sweet to perceive from what misfortunes you yourself are free”. Other people’s bad news – divorce, a redundancy – can leave us feeling relieved it’s not happening to us. For Iris Murdoch even the death of a distant acquaintance could produce a burst of enthusiasm for one’s own aliveness, “a glow of excitement and pleasure … a not yet diagnosed sense of all being exceptionally well with the world”.
There are other pleasures in Schadenfreude. The triumph of a won battle, the superiority of seeing a rival is brought down to size. Even if we don’t care to admit it, feeling an ignoble rush of delight on seeing a politician caught with their hand in the till, or a celebrity’s double life exposed can be affirming. It’s not just that we’re jealous and covet their power and success. We’re also resentful of the importance we’ve given them; part of us wants to see them punished, so our own status can be restored.
Schadenfreude might be seen as the opposite of empathy, but even vicarious sadness can be a pleasure. We all know people who love a good catastrophe, so long as it’s not happening to them. All that gossip and drama, the boxes of wine, the tissues. Misery, as the old saying goes, loves company. It’s reassuring, to hear about other people’s bad decisions and errant spouses and ungrateful children. It reminds us that it’s not only our own hopes that get dashed – everybody else’s do, too.
Smugness
The pink-cheeked gleam of self-satisfaction. Ding! The triumph of a won argument. Ding! The delight – with its extra twist of contempt – of feeling one’s own superiority when a competitor falls. Ding! Ding! Ding! No wonder smugness is so irresistible a feeling. With its flash of triumphant grin, it’s an oasis in a world of mistakes and apologies, a little moment of perfect being-in-the-right-ness, a smart, smooth, polished button of a feeling (“smug” or “smugge” originally meant having a neat, spruce appearance; it was only in the mid-19th century thatit started to mean being conceited, too).
Vergüenza ajena
The face-clawing! The toe-curling! You want to throw your TV out of the window (“I can’t watch!”) but you can’t help glancing back.
Seeing a stranger – a TV contestant, a politician – embarrass themselves in public is an exquisite torture. The Spanish, perhaps particularly attuned to the importance of keeping up one’s dignity, call it vergüenza ajena (literally: ajena, other person, vergüenza, shame, pronounced ver-gwen-tha a-hay-na). When someone realises they’ve made a mistake and blushes, we take it as a kind of apology. The most intense vergüenza ajena is therefore reserved for the thick-skinned and the self-important. They don’t seem to feel the shame they ought – so we supply it by the bucketload on their behalf. And then treat them with derision for this double failure: both for the mistake, and for failing to acknowledge it as one.
Wonder
Many today might associate being dazed and astonished with childishness and naivety. Between the 12th and 17th centuries, however, wonder was the response expected of philosophers and theologians to a world strewn with rare and miraculous objects. This was a world of fantastical animals, where the wealthy bought alligators’ teeth believing they were from dragons, or bezoar stones thinking they were an antidote to poison, and displayed them in theirWunderkammer (often translated as “cabinet of curiosities”; “room of wonders” would be more correct).
With its bewilderment, fear and dazed submission, wonder was thought such an important human experience for God-fearing scholars that when René Descartesmade his inventory of the six “primitive passions” in 1649, he gave wonder top billing.
Wonders began to cease sometime in the second part of the 17th century. In the new cultural atmosphere of the Enlightenment, natural philosophers began to emphasise order over oddities, and sought out natural laws rather than miracles – and so the old lucrative trade in marvels faded away.
In the centuries that followed people have tried to reinvest wonder with the cultural authority it once had. From Romantic poets in the 18th century to hippies in the 20th, many have lamented the unweaving of rainbows. But for most today, curiosity, with its urgent need to discover and explain, has eclipsed slack-jawed wonder as an appropriate emotion.
• Tiffany Watt-Smith’s The Book of Human Emotions: An Encyclopaedia of Feeling from Anger to Wanderlust is published by Profile Books and Wellcome Collection.
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