Emoji and texting tips to help us stay connected through the pandemic

Having trouble making sense of emoji’s and texting abbreviations?

In these trying times, when we depend more than ever on digital communications, the distance between us is amplified by our struggle to interpret text exchanges with members of the next generation.

When Sue and I are fortunate enough to actually receive a timely response to a text message (forget email altogether, TOTAL waste of time), the reply often needs to be read aloud, deciphered by a professor of hieroglyphics, or fed through Bletchley Park’s Enigma machine.

It can feel like we’re playing that old game show – Bumper Stumpers - where stuttering contestants had 7 seconds to decipher the hidden meaning of an endless supply of vanity license plates.

The rich, colourful language that was bequeathed to us has been rammed through a virtual meat grinder with nuanced words deposited in one end and crass abbreviations and befuddling emojis excreted out the other.

It’s worse than George Orwell predicted in his novel, 1984, where, with the goal of controlling dissent, the language of the totalitarian state was continuously culled of superfluous words. If you limit vocabulary, you limit thought itself.

Now it seems the pandemic age has taken Orwell’s foreboding vision one step further and is eliminating the need for words altogether! The distance between us has all but eliminated meaningful dialogue and substituted these annoying pixels of doom.

If any of this sounds familiar - don’t despair - there is hope!

I’ve sifted through a series of texting exchanges with my children and their wordless contemporaries, done my homework, and made some startling discoveries.

Here’s some of what I found:

It’s not like I was taking it as a compliment – but being called POTATO in a text message means neither spud-like nor perpetually chesterfield bound - but rather a “Person Over Thirty Acting Twenty-One.” (A slight with which I have been unwittingly scalloped on more than one occasion.)

While were into foodstuffs, in case you’ve been texted “PITA” and thought “tasty flat bread… not so bad.” How does “Pain In The Ass” sound?

The addition of a winking emoji at the end of an offensive text is akin to a verbal insult that finishes with “Uhhh, just kidding.”

“Uhhh, no you’re not…”

TL;dr was one that had me perplexed. I had hoped it was a responsible response meaning, “Toot-a-loo, I’m Driving.” Turns out the accurate interpretation is “Too Long; Didn’t Read.”

The authoritative website emojipedia.org features 3 emojis with stuck-out tongues. One with eyes open, one with one eye closed and one with both eyes closed. I’m at a loss here. So, as my mother would say, “Don’t stick your tongue out.”

My mom: “Don’t stick your tongue out!”

IANAL generated some raised eyebrows when I came across it in text exchanges. It actually means “I Am Not A Lawyer.”

I interpreted this emoji as the essential, universal question, “Do My Pits Smell?” emojipedia.org explains it’s actually a “Face With OK Gesture.” Go figure.

This emoji, in fact, is not a command to give me 10 push-ups, but rather an expression of gratitude. So, thank God the gyms are closed and I don’t have to do those any more.

Leave it to the Finns to come up with this delightful emoji that perfectly describes what Sue and I have been doing far too often since Covid-19 shut down the world. It’s called Kalsarikannit and signifies drinking at home, alone, in your underwear, with no intention of going out. What could be more civilized?

It’s all enough to make you want to pick up the phone and actually talk to someone… so, I recently invented my own abbreviation: UYW – which is my reply to any unintelligible message or emoji-string from an entitled millennial or brooding teenager. It stands for Use Your Words.

And finally, this emoji is rather apropos. Simple enough, it means “I love you.”

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