Cycles

I was listening to the radio a few days ago - yeah, I do that, especially when I’m driving somewhere. It was a ‘news’ program, and one of the subjects that came up was emojis. They used to be called emoticons, now they are emojis.

Apparently, there is a social app (that is particularly popular in some parts of the world) where you type in your message, and the app converts it into emojis. These little emotion symbols have become so prevalent and so popular, that one man actually ‘translated’ Moby Dick into emojis. 😖

As I listened to this article, I pondered the meaning of this.

Way, way back in time, people started trying to communicate with other people by using pictures. These stylized pictures are called pictographs. These pictographs were eventually simplified into symbols, which then gave way to various alphabets, which were used to make words to convey ideas from one person to another. 🔁 

Now we seem to be going back to pictures. 🌲

Are we starting over? Has language failed us, somehow? Is this another of the cycles that seem to be a part of human history? Or is this just a blip, a fad that will fade out?

I don’t know.

Personally, I find words work pretty well... it’s my brain that sometimes can’t remember the word with the exact emotional nuance I want to convey. 😡

Well, this is embarrassing. All the cute little pictures and emojis I so carefully picked out for this blog showed up perfectly fine UNTIL I posted it! I'm too computer-illiterate to figure out what the problem is. Guess you'll have to imagine your own pictures.