Question : When is a word not a word?
Answer : When it’s a pictograph.
This is not a joke and it makes the Oxford English Dictionary’s decision to name the ‘Face with Tears of Joy’ emoji as this year’s word of the year a very odd one indeed.
A more logical move would have been to give the title to ’emoji’ , a word borrowed from Japanese to denote ‘a small digital image or icon used to express an idea or emotion in electronic communication’.
The key word in this definition is ‘image‘. Unless Oxford University Press (OUP) have plans to turn their dictionary into a picture book it’s hard to fully understand the reasoning behind this.
Casper Grothwahl, the President of the Dictionaries Division highlights that these staples of teen texting culture have now entered the mainstream and therefore that there was a need to acknowledge what he calls this “obsessively immediate” form of communication.
More and more reference books now exist primarily in a digital format with embedded videos and suchlike. This obviously reflects the way we consume information but a distinction should still be made between language we use (i.e. words) and their visual equivalents.
Oxford Dictionary wants to be seen as an up to date resource rather than as a dusty repository of dead or dying language but I think they’ve made a dumb call here.
FILM : A VERY SHORT INTRODUCTION by Michael Wood (Oxford University Press)
Through You Tube, Netflix, Mubi and countless other legal and illegal online resources we have the history of film at our disposal that has never been possible before. There are pros and cons to this that you could argue about until the cows come home but Wood prefers to end on a deliberately positive note : “Film, in its magical animating mode doesn’t define, fix or even represent anything, doesn’t capture, hold or freeze, it lets its objects run, lends them the life we thought they had lost; and shaped or ragged, it mixes what we remember with what we dream and offers us an image of movement that we often can’t quite believe and almost never can deny” .
