Word of the year: an emoji?

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]xford Dictionary has just released its Word of The Year: “the face with tears emoji.” You may think it’s a joke – trust me, I did too. However, according to dictionary experts, the emoji “embodies a core aspect of living in a digital world that is visually driven, emotionally expressive, and obsessively immediate”.

The Word of The Year is supposed to represent what our society has most talked about in the past twelve months. To give you an idea, we had “selfie” in 2013, “carbon footprint” in 2007 and Catherine Tate’s iconic “bovvered” in 2006.

The shortlist for 2015’s Word of the Year included “on fleek”, the singular pronoun “they” and even “refugee”, a term that has seamlessly entered our vocabulary to explain one of the aftermaths of the Syrian War. This begs the question: is an emoji an actual word?

For starters, emojis have become somewhat synonymous with politicians and big corporations. Hilary Clinton, a candidate for the 2016 American presidential elections, constantly uses them to bring in younger followers.

Furthermore, Domino’s pizza has also recently introduced a system in the US where you can text the pizza emoji to their number and have it delivered to your door, removing the need to actually choose what you want.

Many books have been translated into emojis, such as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Moby Dick and even The Holy Bible. But does that make it okay? It could just highlight how much we have become obsessed with communicating via phones and text message rather than actually speaking to each other.

But I disagree. Humans used to communicate with pictures drawn on cave walls. Is it really so strange that we now communicate with the 21st century equivalent? This little emoji apparently made up 20% of all emojis used in the UK, and as we all use smartphones more and more, this number will only grow.

If we had our very own word of the year to represent all things Warwick-related, what would it be? I’m guessing we wouldn’t shy away from making it the famous aubergine, especially in light of our new logo. It could also represent our favourite drink: Purple. Because when else is the poor emoji going to be used?