I’ve always assumed that emojis are used by youngsters with smartphones and bad spellings and those of us who are perennially complaining of less time. But then as I went through the pages of this book, my own ignorance came hurtling towards me… I mean, conversations using emojis as the alphabet, emojis to represent complex travel phrases, emojis to pose as the names of movies, emojis as the words of lyrics… the list is far longer than this and the book kept me awake for the better part of the night, reading and whatsapping emoji-laden sentences.
I was, of course reading the pdf version on my Adobe Digital Reader and the one constant thought in my mind was: ‘Why can’t I just copy the emoji sequence given here and paste it in a message in another window?’ I guess this is a rather normal urge as not many people like to open the web-page with a listing of tens of emojis and then spending an average of seven minutes searching for the correct ones to copy and create a sentence. I must have wished a hundred times that the pdf that I was reading did not have the copy-feature disabled… it would’ve made life so much easier. An alternative thought was wishing that the author had given the keyboard codes to create emojis, if this is something that is possible.
The book is helpfully divided into sections to appeal to everyone from all age-groups. There are literary quotes as well as the lyrics of songs by contemporary singers translated into emojis… there is a section that communicates the names of movies and TV series through emojis. Each section was fascinating and it was almost like playing some sort of a game where I was constantly preventing my eyes from looking at the English translation before I could decode the emoji-sequence.
If you’re wondering about the entire list of sections included in the book, let me just tell you that it has everything from pickup lines to insults and from weather to relationships as emoji phrases. Imagine staring at an idiom expressed as a set of emojis… doesn’t it sound really interesting?
‘How to speak emoji’ is certainly an interesting title from Andrews McMeel Publishing. Fred Benenson, the author of this book has made sure that the sections are long enough to include all the interesting representations and short enough not to let the reader doze off.
The book starts with a few pages explaining each emoji and qualifies to be a sort of dictionary. After all, the entire book is dedicated to communicating in a language that the smart-gen is already in love with, right? However, games and fun apart, reading the book made me give a serious thought to the patterns of language development as they may have happened centuries ago… visual representation is the most basic kind of communication tool and I did smile as I muttered, ‘We’re certainly searching for our roots in earnest, aren’t we?’
Book details:
Title: How to speak emojis
Author: Fred Benenson
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
ISBN: 978-1-4494-7802-5
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How to speak emojis
How to speak emojis_Fred Benenson
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Arvind Passey
06 July 2016
