An elderly teen discovers how normal adolescents use emojis in the modern age

I am not an avid user of the “technologies” and have lived happily with a dumb phone for years. Recently, I inherited my brother’s iPhone 5S. My first smart phone, and thus I have plunged into a realm of poorly understood technological culture. Weeks later, I still remain terrified.

I learned the basics of texting and calling. There were some more advanced lessons where I found the stopwatch voicemail.

It wasn’t until I was texting a group, and the other members started laying on the emojis, that is when things got really complicated. Now, I am familiar with old fashioned texting emojis, such as 😛 🙂 🙁 :/ and a few others, but fireballs? Is someone on fire? No, maybe they burned themselves earlier. Wait, it could be more figurative. Hm… Aha! They think we should destroy our previous ideas! But wait I thought they were good ideas… Sigh.

Eventually the people in the group chat took pity on me. Though they failed to translate the plague of fire-hail raining on the conversation, they told me where to find the emoji icons in my keyboard. But once I got there, I was lost. When would I ever need a shoe emoji? Much less the five different shoe styles available. Millennials are unlikely to remember Khrushchev banging his shoe on the podium in the midst of a heated speech in New York in 1960. In the Middle East, throwing one’s shoe is a sign of disrespect, as the bottoms are covered in dirt. Is that what the shoe emoji means? EAT DIRT?

Emojis, like modern catch phrases, are defined by social groups. It was time to self-educate. Mary H.K. Choi writes a helpful article in WIRED called, “Here’s How to Emoji Flirt Like a Real Teenager.” I am so ready.

But the article left me with so many questions. In Choi’s list of “The Bare Essentials,” she depicts images of various fruits, shells, a doughnut and raindrops. “All emoji equivalents of nudes,” Choi describes them, “Use with caution or else complete abandon, depending on the desired reaction and receptiveness of the recipient.”

Why, please God, tell me why a doughnut doesn’t just mean “doughnut”? What is so hard about that? Turns out there is a whole world of the scandalous doughnut sexting emoji that I was not aware of. Not to mention I will never look at an eggplant the same way.

Later on, Choi claims that two googly eyes looking to one side are the equivalent of, “What are you doing?” No. Wrong. The shifty eyes are much more of an “eeeeem, did I do that??”

Oh lord. This is hopeless. Ok, no biggie, I just have to learn what they mean.

That is when I stumbled across another article, “How Do Olds Use Emoji? Incorrectly According to WIRED,” by Katy Waldman. Here, Waldman goes through some of Choi’s emojis with Choi’s teenage definitions and Waldman’s usage as an “old” person (over 20).

I was still confident that I could be a teenager, so I scoffed at Waldman and returned to Choi. There had to be something here I could understand!

The blushing smiley face: this is nice, right? A little, ‘oh my gosh, thank you so much!’ RIGHT??? Wrong. Choi writes that it means, “Thanks But No Thanks: Hi. Um. Not interested. Sorry? Sorry!”

I am officially old.

By Yoela Zimberoff