On the way home from dinner with girlfriends I composed my usual thank-you text. Smashing company, delicious food, must see you all again. A couple of kisses. Feeling this wasn’t enough, I added a line of coloured pictures: an ice cream in a cone, a slice of cake with a strawberry on top, a bar of chocolate, a cup of steaming coffee — near enough representations of the puddings we had shared.
The replies came back: smiley faces, rows of hearts, bowls of spaghetti (it had been an Italian), martini glasses.
My friends and I are in our late twenties and early thirties, yet we communicate using emoji: the sort of cute, pastel-coloured symbols that we’d have been embarrassed to have in our primary school sticker albums. What has possessed otherwise articulate, professional women — barristers, solicitors, doctors, English teachers, financial journalists, all with degrees — to end their text messages and social media posts with pink hearts, sparkly diamonds and glossy apples?
Until a few months ago, I rolled my eyes at smiley faces and bunny rabbits. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s I had resisted emoticons — punctuation marks combined to give an expressive smiley 🙂 or sad 🙁 face. I winced at the texts sent by one boyfriend full of grinning parentheses and winking semicolons. He spoke four languages and he had a doctorate — why did he type like a toddler?
A couple of years ago, everyone I knew bought iPhones, which have more than 700 emoji symbols in bright, cartoon colours. I still had a five-year-old non-smart phone that registered any emoji it received as a series of black rectangles and dots — about as cute as Morse code. But at my computer, on Twitter, I could see them: little can-can lines of sweeties, balloons, hearts and stars.
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