EMOTICONS AND TEXT-SPEAK

I don’t know whether Gen Zs will believe me, but in the early days of texting, before there were emojis, we had to use plain-text characters to convey emotion.

There was the classic smiley :)

The natural frowny face :(

And of course the laugh :D and the morally ambiguous ‘winky face’ ;)

Beyond that, you had to get creative. You could be nonchalant :| and shocked :o … or I suppose really shocked :O but beyond that I don’t exactly remember using more complicated emoticons myself.

I used to think that words were powerful enough without resorting to trite little pictures of how you were feeling. I mean Shakespeare didn’t need them, and he had full access to punctuation…

It was a bit snobby of me to think like that in my early twenties. I’ve never been really hot-headed, but the use of emoticons, how to make tea properly, and the difference between ‘less’ and ‘fewer’ were exactly enough to bubble up my temperature in those days.

One thing I never did was a ROFL.

In parallel to punctuation-based emoticons, abbreviated emotion was making its way into (what we called at the time) ‘text-speak’. LOL was first. It’s hung around for a long time LOL, but in the early days it meant ‘lots of love’ as well as ‘laugh out loud’. David Cameron even fell foul of that confusion I remember. I don’t know whether LOL is still used widely, but I have a few friends in their thirties and early forties who still appreciate a good LOL (or lol) from time-to-time.

ROFL was an extension. If LOL corresponded to :D (I think ha = :) by the way) then there was no real way to make ROFL into an emoticon. You had to spell it out. ROFL was reserved for things so funny that they knocked you off of your computer, made you drop your Nokia 3310, and pushed you into such a fit of unbridled hilarity… that you would find yourself unaccountably rolling on the floor with laughter.

Tears streaming, muscles aching, sides splitting. ROFL was like seeing Marie Lloyd in an Edwardian theatre, like hearing the comedy stylings of a vaudeville joke teller , or watching a You’ve Been Framed for the first time as a thirteen year old.

It wasn’t long before msn messenger (remember that?) and more modern phones started to translate and auto-correct emoticons and text-speak straight into emojis. ROFL became a rotated smiley face with tears of joy and a stretched grin - literally, I suppose, rolling with laughter.

I still don’t use it.

But maybe I should have. Maybe I should have ROFLd a bit more. I could have been a bit less pompous about things I suppose. I mean who cares how you make your tea! If it works for you, that’s all you need! 

But very few things have been funny enough to collapse my knees and then remove my ability to function. I kind of wish they had.

Sometimes in these uncertain days we live in, I could really do with a ROFL.