By Isabella Pilot ’18

If you could describe 2015 in one word, what would it be? For the staff of the Oxford dictionary, the words lumbersexual, refugee, and on fleek came to mind, but the “word” that triumphed over them all isn’t a word at all.

With over 171,000 words in the English language, the ‘Face With Tears of Joy’ emoji was crowned 2015 Word of the Year on November 16. This emoji “made up 20 percent of all the emojis used in the U.K. in 2015, and 17 percent of those in the U.S.,” according to Oxford University Press.

To understand this problem, we can first look at emojis as a whole. 845 of them are home to the keyboards of nearly every smartphone in the world, ranging from images of faces, food, flags, symbols, clothes, animals, structures, and even a pile of smiling poop. At times they are helpful; it’s much easier to send a heart emoji at the end of a message than typing out “I love you.” But is convenience enough to qualify a symbol as word of the year?

At a certain point, emojis surpass ease-of-use into pure laziness. “I love you” is eight finger swipes; more than that, “I love you” is a personal connection. A picture of a heart, sent off in two taps, is often too quickly duplicated, watering down this expression of human emotion into little meaning anymore. Before, “I love you’s” were saved for perfect, meaningful moments, spoken out with sweaty palms and jittery nerves. Today, heart emojis are slapped onto the end of messages about the weather without a second thought.

It’s not that emojis suddenly help us feel more, either. Adding a laughing face to the end of a message does not suddenly make it funnier. Emojis simply provide another outlet for today’s society to express their overly drawn-out feelings to each other; except, instead of reading about how your one friend’s day is yet again the worst day of their life, you have to suffer through 34 rainy cloud emojis as a caption on their latest post. It’s not an improvement, just the same story in new “words.”

In addition to its convenience, Oxford staff cited the ‘universal understanding’ the emoji offers to its viewers. Anyone of any language can understand that a laughing face indicates humor. However, none of the other honored words are easy for all languages to understand, but instead celebrate the uniqueness of the English Language. The word lumbersexual, describing one attracted to men who sport hipster beards and flannel tops frequently, while a bit arbitrary, is extremely interesting.

The reduction of words to symbols is just something one struggles to grasp as revolutionary. It seems that after all these years of beautiful literature, informative publications, and provocative poetry under the complexity of our growing vocabulary, we would only want to expand it even more. But, as emojis demonstrate, this is not the case. Instead, we devolve to cavemen, with emojis being our own form of drawings on stone walls.

Most perplexing of all has to be the specific choice of emoji. It is hard to pick an exact feeling to describe 2015, but the humor attached to the “laughing face” emoji seems to miss the mark. Perhaps a gun, a police car or a fence to symbolize some hot-button debates encompassing the western world. Or, better yet, a skull to symbolize how doomed we are as a society for actually picking an emoji as word of the year.