The Oxford Dictionary named the “tears of joy” emoji as their word of the year.
As the world’s authority on language, you’ve set verbal discourse back years, decades, dare we say millennia. You’re essentially saying that communicating via pictogram is the way of the future. And they’re not even good pictograms like the Egyptian hieroglyphics where everyone’s facing left. No, they’re “Have a Nice Day” happy faces.
Here’s the problem with what you’ve done, Oxford: you’ve given today’s youth an alternative to finding just the right word for an occasion. Instead of working to expand their vocabularies, they’ll default to emoji-land, and all the colour of language will start to disappear from the lexicon. Not today. Not tomorrow. But eventually.
It’s been said that the Egyptian civilization crumbled because of incest. Well, maybe if they had the words to say, “Get off me, dude, you’re my brother,” instead of a vague image of a frowning princess, perhaps they’d still be around?