It's hard to gauge just how cynical one should be toward announcements from the Oxford English Dictionary. They're always adding outrage-inducing slang words -- sometimes with hilariously genteel definitions -- or defending modernity's worst behavior for having "quite spectacular" Victorian roots. Some days, the OED feels more like The Onion. Like yesterday, when it announced via blog post that its 2015 Word of the Year is not a word at all.
An emoji -- the 'Face With Tears of Joy' emoji, to be exact -- has become the first pictograph to beat out words constructed of alphabetic signifiers. It was chosen, the post says, "as the 'word' that best reflected the ethos, mood, and preoccupations of 2015."
Sigh. (Please click here for a more precise expression of that emotion.)
The post further explains the OED partnered with SwiftKey, the same company that made the excruciatingly dubious claim about Texas' signature emoji, "to explore frequency and usage statistics for some of the most popular emoji across the world." The Face With Tears of Joy was, reportedly, the most globally-utilized emoji in 2015; and, in America, its usage rose from 9 percent to 17 percent of all emojis used between 2014 and 2015.
Does this mean we're living in a post-lexeme society?
Not entirely. Runners up included words and phrases like 'on fleek,' 'Dark Web' and 'they,' used in the singular to denote gender fluidity or uncertainty. Besides, our mental states are far too chemically unaltered this morning to delve down the rabbit hole of Senior Level Lit Theory.
To its credit, the OED doctored up its announcement with cool infographics, combining mathematical statistics, alphabetic characters, social media posts and pictographs in a lovely melting pot of peaceable information, like the chart below. Unsatisfied with Face With Tears of Joy taking the title? Head over to the OED blog to vote for your favorite from the shortlist.
