海角大神

For the first time ever, Oxford Dictionaries Word of the year is an emoji. The was chosen to represent 鈥渢he the ethos, mood, and preoccupations of 2015.鈥�

Oxford University Press partnered with SwiftKey, a smartphone app that supports auto-correct features, and identified the laughing with tears emoji to be the most used globally, making up 20 percent of all emojis used in the UK and 17 percent of those in the US.

So why an emoji? Oxford Dictionaries Corpus sites a for 2015, triple that of the year before. 聽

And this is hardly surprising when reading today鈥檚 studies 鈥� or simply your text messages.听

According to SwiftKey, report using an emoji every single day. The social media site Instagram, with over 400 million users, reports half of all Instagram comments include .听

And in a 2015 study by Talk Talk Mobile, of Brits between the ages of 18 and 65 use emojis to communicate regularly.

Lane Brown, a former editor with 海角大神, swore off emojis for a month last year after she felt she over-utilized the images to communicate. Brown said she was tired of sounding 鈥渓ike a middle-school cheerleader鈥� when checking in on a friend via text message.

Jonathan Jones, an art writer for The Guardian, says emojis鈥� similarity to Egyptians鈥� hieroglyphics signals a step back for human evolution.听

鈥淭he Greek alphabet was much more productive than all those lovely Egyptian pictures. That is why there is no ancient Egyptian Iliad or Odyssey,鈥� he argues. 鈥淚n other words, on what you can say with pictures. The written word is infinitely more adaptable.鈥澛�

But not all linguistic experts say our emoji obsession is a bad thing.

Emojis are usually used positively, suggesting a void in the written language. 鈥淭he overall thing we noticed is that 70 percent of all emojis sent are positive and so that鈥檚 probably a good thing that and using emoji to enhance that,鈥� Joe Braidwood, chief marketing officer for SwiftKey, told NPR.

Lauren Collister, a socio-linguist from the University of Pittsburgh, told Wisconsin Public Radio earlier this year that emojis act as 鈥渄iscourse markers,鈥� conveying emotions that would otherwise be impossible in written language.

鈥淒iscourse markers are these little bits of language that convey the tone or the overlying meaning of what we鈥檙e saying,鈥� explains Collister. 鈥淲e usually do this in spoken language with our voice or tone. But when you have text only, that鈥檚 not really an option. So people started using emoticons as to their writing.鈥�

Collister says emojis鈥� incorporation into written language, and the surrounding criticism, are actually natural. as long as it鈥檚 existed, says Collister, recalling an angry 63 A.D. Roman professor who complained about his Latin students鈥� new way of speaking: a language that would later become French.

Before the rise of texting, Neil Postman, an acclaimed American media theorist and critic, predicted in 1985 that changes in communication methods will be simultaneous with changes in language.

This argument 鈥渇ixes its attention on the forms of human conversation, and postulates that how we are obliged to conduct such conversations will have the strongest possible influence on what ideas we can conveniently express,鈥� Postman explains in his book "Amusing Ourselves to Death."

鈥淎nd what ideas are convenient to express inevitably become .鈥�