Throughout history, those most devoted to the spoken — and, later, the written — word have always been alert to the imminent destruction of the language (I’m talking about English here, but I imagine it’s the same in other tongues). This or that newfangled way to communicate was going to ruin literate conversation and writing as we know it.
And it never happens, no matter how many times we shout, Clint Eastwood-style, at the youth (and it’s always the youth) we see as mangling with the elegance of English to “get off my lawn!” Despite every assault, the language grows (if sometimes in an ungainly way, as though stuck in a perpetual linguistic puberty) and remains vibrant.
Take texting. Surely you’ve heard that smartphone shorthand is destroying our children’s ability to speak to each other or to adults, as though an LOL or a TTYL erases their ability to read Shakespeare (or, for that matter, the book TTYL, Lauren Myracle’s now decade-old YA bestseller written entirely in messages and texts). You could argue that constant texting, to the exclusion of speaking face to face, can have the effect of stunting a person’s ability to, say, look someone in the eye and respond intelligently during the back and forth that used to be called conversation. But just looking at texting in and of itself, there’s a very good argument to be made that it, and its cousin, the use of emojis, are enhancing the language rather than destroying it.
OMG, you’re thinking, right? OMG, what happens to, say Shakespeare? What happens is — ta da! — the emergence of a series of Shakespeare plays — OMG Shakespeare — rewritten in text-speak, replete with hashtags. YOLO Juliet, anyone? What about Srsly, Hamlet? They exist, enlivening rather than deadening language.
And as for emojis, those electronic pictographs born in Japan and now used by everyone and their mother (even mine!) on smartphones and social-media messages? They’re the inevitable child of texting and other forms of electronic communication. Typing on a tiny keyboard is difficult — so how much more (dare I say) elegant to slip in a smiley rather than type, “that makes me so happy!” One emoji can convey a lot of info in a small space, serve as punctuation, add energy, and reflect tone. And isn’t tone what we complain is hard to get across in the written word?
In 2009, a man named Fred Benenson crowd-funded an emoji-only translation of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, and he reached his goal. Emoji Dick was translated from the original English by thousands of people, line by line. Your high school English teacher might hope it gets more young people to pick up Melville’s original, and maybe that’s the point. But another point about emoji use is this: it’s decidedly not its own language (even with thousands of glyphs to choose from it can’t compare or compete with English). Instead, it adds to the language, expands the users ability to get across a concept or a feeling. Think of them as modern-day cave paintings.
And if you’re really worried about the kids, pick up a copy of Debra Fine’s Beyond Texting: The Fine Art of Face-to-Face Communication for Teenagers. Couldn’t hurt.