外刊阅读20240526｜表情包，95后的新标点符号

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Don’t be alarmed if you see young people use increasingly macabre emojis online. In the past few years, for instance, the skull emoji has transformed into a symbol to communicate humor or irony. Much like an exclamation point or question mark, it can serve to both separate text and contextualize how a sentence should be understood. Although it might seem silly, the skull in my sentence serves a very important function. If I texted this to a friend without the emoji, it would either come across as boastful or oddly formal. Punctuating the text with a skull lightens the tone and signals humility by shifting attention to the absurdity of the situation.

In this sense, the emoji is a tone tag — a character specifying the message’s intent. You’re very aware of this concept, even if you don’t know it. Exclamation points are just tone tags indicating excitement, while question marks signal curiosity or confusion. People have tried introducing tone tags for irony before: In the late 1580s, English printer Henry Denham proposed a “ percontation point” (⸮) for rhetorical questions. Other iterations of the “irony mark” popped up in the late 17th century — an inverted exclamation point (¡) — and, more recently, in 2010 — through a swirly character called the “SarcMark” — but nothing caught on .

These didn’t work for a few reasons. They were hard to standardize and were largely unnecessary in a time when most informal communication was happening in person, where marking tone is easy. If you find something funny, you laugh and people know what that means. But now we have to mark tone in informal communication online, which requires us to navigate an uncertain, ambiguous medium open to misinterpretation. If you’re not careful, you come across sounding passive-aggressive; too careful, you come across sounding unnatural.

Thankfully, the emoji keyboard presented a readily accessible and standardized solution. Since 2011, we’ve been able to indicate laughing through the laughing-crying emoji, which became so widely used that the Oxford English Dictionary chose it as its 2015 Word of the Year. However, this very popularity, coupled with our constant need to mark tone online, led to overuse. Suddenly, things had grown so “funny” that we were weeping tears of joy all the time, meaning that it was hard to distinguish when someone was actually laughing versus just trying to lighten the tone.

Our escalating vocabulary for showing what we find funny has likewise led to a dizzying cycle of emoji evolution, since tone tags change just like words do. Once the laughing-crying emoji became passé, we mirrored the expression “I’m crying” with the crying emoji, and once that lost its appeal, we turned to the skull emoji, drawing on the idea of being “dead” from laughing. This is part of a linguistic process called “ semantic bleaching .” The more we use a charged word, the more its original meaning is diluted until it’s lost altogether and needs to be replaced. This isn’t new. We’ve been semantically bleaching since words like “very” (which comes from Old French verai, meaning “truthfully”) and “really” (which once meant “in reality”). Eventually, the intensifiers became oversaturated for expressing sincerity, so now we just use them to add emotional weight to statements.