The Circles of Grammar Hell

Seventh Circle: Using Emojis To Sum Up Feelings or Events That Are Way Too Complicated for Emojis To Sum Up

"So you thought you were being “economical” and “Hemingwayesque” by leaving others wondering what the shit you meant by your cryptic emojis? You’re now cursed to be eternally robbed of resolution. The results of your recent chlamydia screening? 😶 And what was that “seafood” you had in the third circle? 🦄"

So we’re getting near to the core of it. The nub, the heaving, molten, bubbling essence of Dante’s inferno, as Reimagined for Linguistic Transgressions by John Rauschenberg. To my mind however the depths of Hell were reached last week when we entered the circle of misused apostrophes. Reaching the seventh circle to me feels like we’re through the storm and are entering the eye. Relative calm, especially after the whole episode with the abbreviations. I fully expect on level seven to be commuting with souls who have, quite honestly, lost the will to converse in whole sentences and who have entered a trance-like state of emojis.

I have a guilty secret. I know I shouldn’t – I am a self-confessed wordsmith, after all – but I quite like the odd emoji. These little pictures can take the sting out of a barbed remark (something I can find quite useful when I’m in full rant mode on Facebook!), inject humour into an otherwise overwhelmingly pessimistic outpouring about the end of the world (as in, “the great thing about global warming is that our central heating bills will be lower, and we’ll not have to pay them at all when we’re under six feet of rising sea water. 👋 Not waving but drowning”), or just save you a whole lot of autocorrect mistakes and post-send proofreading and follow up corrective messages by obviating the need for language at all.

But one problem I have when using my smart phone to check and send messages is the small screen and the size of the emoji symbols relative to my bespectacled eyes’ ability to see them clearly. Apart from the fact that I don’t understand what most of the facial emojis are trying to convey, I have difficulty sometimes seeing them well enough to even choose one that looks vaguely appropriate to the nature of the message I’m sending. I’m sure I must have sent congratulatory texts to people accompanied by angry emoji faces that I’ve mistaken for being expressions of excitement, which must have left them wondering about my sanity 😡. Similarly, I’m sure there have been times when I’ve been expressing condolences about some awful event accompanied by smiley faces and thumbs up signs, which must have left people frankly wondering whether I should be allowed out at all 🤣.

So my advice is to stick to what you know and don’t start trying to get too clever with these little devices of emotional symbolism. The subtle range of emotions necessary for successful human communication is difficult enough to get right using words, but the careful choice of vocabulary and expression can be blown out of the water by misplaced emoji.