There was a time when words mattered. When writing and speaking wasn’t confined to the 140 character limit that not only made Orwell’s nightmarish vision of the elimination of words in “1984” a hip idea, but is now leading us down a horrific, dark and yokel-ish path that was foretold in “Idiocracy.” When instead of laughing, we LOL. Because we are apparently too busy in this work-a-day world to not slaughter the English language with acronyms and garbage Twitter slang.
Adding to this golden era of word slaughter (that has made WTF a word) the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year for 2015 went even further by making this year’s champion an emoji. Yes, an emoji, that ridiculous goofy-faced graphic that people include on texts and Facebook comments. Which in of itself I do not mind, but it certainly isn’t a word, is it?
So we are basically back to using pictographs to convey our thoughts and feelings again, because it is easier to tweet and text I guess.
According to Oxford Dictionaries’ blog: That’s right – for the first time ever, the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year is a pictograph, officially called the ‘Face with Tears of Joy’ emoji, though you may know it by other names. There were other strong contenders from a range of fields, outlined below, but [emoji] was chosen as the ‘word’ that best reflected the ethos, mood, and preoccupations of 2015.
The JOE-DOWN 