By Marie Bissell
Merle Kling Undergraduate Fellow, Class of 2017
Even amid technology’s increasingly expansive grip on the lives of everyday Americans, Oxford Dictionaries recently made a gutsy move that prompted outcries from linguistic purists across the nation: It declared the “Face with Tears of Joy” emoji as its 2015 Word of the Year. Oxford Dictionaries’ controversial christening of this pictograph as the defining character of the year was not without careful consideration and scrutiny, yet major news outlets such as New York Magazine and Business Insider boldly proclaimed that the foremost authority on the English language had made a terrible mistake. Vox reporter Caroline Franke suggested that “no matter how much we communicate with emoji these days, the English language isn’t Wingdings — at least not yet.”
This kind of resistance to language change is common among linguistic purists, who insist that it is possible and probable that language will evolve too quickly, to detrimental ends. Flavorwire reporter Jonathon Sturgeon notes that, ironically, “emoji also represents the wild visage of a person who has lost it. In other words: no other word or pictogram … gives better expression to their [linguistic purists'] complaint.”
However, Oxford Dictionaries, which has been publishing dictionaries for upwards of 150 years, has a solid justification for its widely contested choice. As explained on its website, “The Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year is a word or expression that we can see has attracted a great deal of interest during the year to date…. This year, instead of choosing a traditional word or expression, Oxford Dictionaries has chosen an example of this type of pictographic script to represent the sharp increase in popularity of emojis across the world in 2015.” Essentially, an emoji functions as a pictorial representation of a word or expression, making it equally eligible for recognition by Oxford Dictionaries.
The primary issue with the knee-jerk backlash the selection has spurred is that Oxford Dictionaries is not designed to make normative judgments about the merits of linguistic change over time. Rather, its primary objective is to describe linguistic change in real time. Skeptics counter that Oxford Dictionaries’ Word of the Year endorsement carries prescriptive weight, even if it is not explicitly intended to do so. As arguably the foremost authority on the English language, Oxford Dictionaries faces the challenge that perhaps its descriptive intents could be misinterpreted by the public in this way.
But are the “Face with Tears of Joy” emoji’s critics simply unwilling to believe that technology alters language usage? English is constantly evolving and transforming; in fact, the BBC estimates that a new word is added every 98 minutes (in other words, almost 15 new words daily). The advent of widespread technology usage among English speakers has revolutionized the way the people communicate with one another, and that certainly includes the innovative introduction of the emoji as a new medium for communication. Oxford Dictionaries’ choice of “Face with Tears of Joy” emoji as 2015’s Word of the Year reflects our culture’s increasing reliance on technology and signals the direction of the linguistic developments that are yet to come.
