| Emojis/emoticons shouldn't become a form of language, thats because they're meant to be something else closer to punctuation. They're really in-line annotation glyphs that add context, meaning and emotion to writing which enables clarity. They can almost be thought of as parenthetical asides which are intended by the writer to aid the reader in understanding tone and emotion in a compact way. For example, which form unambiguously conveys sarcasm the best? "Oh, it's Sam, isn't that great!" "Oh, it's Sam, isn't that great! (jerk)" Now replace (jerk) with an appropriate glyph and we're at emojis. What written language sorely lacks is a standardized update to the punctuation system we use. We're limited to single digit tone marks and a couple ways of modifying the text to try to convey a tremendous range of tones and emotions. We also need a system that does so without using cartoon characters. It's very hard to convey serious emotional tones with variations of a yellow smiley face. Western musical notation has an entire series of annotation marks to inform style on top of the basic "sentence" structure of the notes. It seems that writing also could use something similar. |