Maybe writers should dispense with words and just use emojis to express opinions, By Hal M. Brown

 

In today's blog I take a break from pure poltics and write about about linguistics, language, words, and writing.

There was an article about Kari Lake being selected to lead the Voice of America which was shown on the top of the page in HuffPost (above with arrow). It didn't offer any opinion. All it said was the following:

The president-elect named Kari Lake, the failed Arizona Senate and gubernatorial candidate, to be the next director of Voice of America. The media network is funded by the U.S. government and is meant to be an unbiased source of news for people around the planet.

VOA provides news in nearly 50 languages and reaches a weekly audience of more than 350 million people, according to its website.

Lake, Trump said, will “ensure that the American values of Freedom and Liberty are broadcast around the World FAIRLY and ACCURATELY, unlike the lies spread by the Fake News Media.”

Lake is a fierce denier of the 2020 presidential election results and refused to concede her race for Arizona governor in 2022.

The title was preceded by the thinking face emoji. This is the "yellow face with furrowed eyebrows looking upwards with thumb and index finger resting on its chin. It is intended to show a person pondering or deep in thought. Often used to question or scorn something or someone, as if saying Hmm, I don't know about that. Tone varies, including earnest, playful, puzzled, skeptical, and mocking." Reference.

At the most recent count I could find there are 1874 emojis in 10 categories and 100 subcategories. While some are objects, activites, and symbols many convey a range of emotions (see here).  You can find all of the emojis here.

I can see a time when some writers who are tired of putting together words decide simply to report what Trump and his allies are doing and the consequences for the country without offering an opinion. There are enough emojis to do this.

Here's one example:

Meaning of 😤 Face With Steam From Nose Emoji 

The 😤 Face With Steam From Nose emoji is often depicted as a frowning face with closed 👀 Eyesand steam coming out of its 👃 Nose, which typically represents extreme anger (similar to mad bulls in cartoons). This is why its most common meaning is related to 💢 Anger, aggression, and frustration. It is often used to symbolize someone struggling to manage their intense negative emotions.

As anyone who has used them knowsm combining emojis can elaborate on a reaction or what they want to express. For example, follow the steaming nose emoji with this one:

Meaning of 🤯 Exploding Head Emoji 

The 🤯 Exploding Head emoji is a face with the head removed to reveal a 🍄 Mushroom ☁️ Cloud. It's commonly used to express the feeling of being mind-blown after learning or discovering something new. It's okay to have those moments of confusion because it's always 😄 Fun to learn something new. 

If you want to show your confusion towards your new discovery, you can send this emoji along with a ❓ Question Mark emoji. But for a little fun, you can use the 🧠 Brain emoji and the 💣 Bomb emoji instead to show that your latest realization blows your mind. 

It's basically used to show that you don't understand something because someone said too many things.

Many of the articles warning about what Trump plans to do to the country and the world go on and on and on. Word and after word after word, sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph. I don't know how many people actually read every word in an article. For that matter I don't know how many people read every word of my blogs and I usually intersperse text with illustrations.

How many people who need to be enlightened about Trump actually read books like these six from 2020 (reviewed here)?

Maybe Kash Patel had a good idea reducing his nasty ideas to three books for children. He may grasp that everything has to be dumbed down to reach the people who need to be reached in Trumpworld.

I expect that lovers of language lament the prospect of the literary landscape being overrun with emjois replacing words and phrases expressing nuanced and complex ideas and emotions previously expressed with, well, you remember them, words.

I haven't succumbed to the temptation to use emojis, but in the blogs and substacks I read I haven't found any that use illustrations the way I do.

I am seeing more artwork, some created by AI, used as primary illustrations. In fact, back to Kash Patel's book, the illustration in Alexandra Petri's column (here, subscription) was animated.

This Washington Post column is also animated:

My point is that in order to get some people to pay attention and keep to them engaged you have to use various tricks. The so-called "gray lady" New York Times didn't even use color photographs until 1997.

Before that a typical front page looked like this:

Occassionally they would include illustrations:

Here's today's front page.

This is The New York Times. How many Trump voters even read The New York Times? If they read any print newspaper at all if they are New Yorkers they probably read Rupert Murdoch's New York Post.

Trump got away with convincing people that speaking gibberish was something he called the weave and that it was brilliant. Trump dumbed everything down and managed to convince people he was someone he clearly wasn't. One Trump voter told The New York Times he thought Trump was compassionate and a believer in Christ. I wrote about this yesterday.

According to this article you can use emojis on Truth Social but I don't know if Trump has ever used them or, for that matter, if he even knows how to use them. I looked at about 20 of his Truth Social posts and didn't see any emojis. Along with images and GIFs they are very easy to use on X and BlueSky.

It is no surprise that the role of emojis and how they effect language is the subject of learned discussion. For example in "Emoticons and symbols aren’t ruining language – they’re revolutionizing it" from The Conversation back in 2015.

I am one of many who have said that the Democrats are lousy at reaching low information and uncritical voters. I'm not really saying we should replace words with emojis but we damn well better learn how to get our message across to people who may be amenable to hearing our side of the story.

Recent blogs: A decidely unempathic fantasy about what I wish for Trump voters, addressing Hegseth and his toxic masculinity, another about Trump and MAGA toxic masculinity, and a sign Trump may have dementia.

Previous list of  all blogs here.

Primary Hal Brown's Blog website is halbrown.org (if you are reading this anywhere else any additions or corrections will be at this address)

Stop calling the GOP anti-woke hysteria weird. Weird is wonderful. Call it wiggy instead.

By Hal Brown

The GOP has gone wiggy in their war on woke.

The author lives in a suburb of wonderfully weird Portland, Oregon.

Click above and below to enlarge the images

Here in Portland, Oregon we are proud of being weird and wonderful. Keep Portland Weird is a frequently used slogan (read about it on Wikipedia).

This is the webpage of Travel Portland:

This conveys how Portland is both weird and woke.

This is from the website Boundless Roads:

Cities like Portland aren't the only promoters of weird and woke as a positive image. For example Weird N Woke is a line of clothing which combines weird with woke in their name  .

The company, founded in Lancaster, PA, offers clothing like the Liberty is Dead t-shirt. Here's their Facebook page. I am now a fan of the company and appreciate that the founder Austin Welk (about him) resides in the Republican Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. It voted GOP in every presidential election since 2000 and in the last Presidential election the vote was Republican, 56.9% to 41.2% Democrat. 

Another way weird is used in a positive sense is in services. For example some of these are described here.

The first column I read this morning was this (subscription):

One word in a sentence prompted me to write a comment in the article:

But Biden’s biggest advantage has to do with the opposition — the Republican Party has gotten weird.

Here's my comment:

I live in Portland, Orgeon, which proudly proclaims (as does Denver) itself as wonderfully weird. Thus I suggest that calling the Republican Party weird is a misnomer and does weirdness a disservice. I suggest the word wiggy which includes weird in the definition: emotionally uncontrolled or weird.

At this writing seven readers there recommended my comment:

Following posting this I realized I should have included Austin as a proudly weird city.

Then I looked at Raw Story where I saw this article:

The word was used in this sentence:

As a result, “They have to win the endorsement of a crowd in an echo chamber having a conversation that the rest of the country thinks is too nasty or weird to join,” he wrote.

Headline writers often use alliterations so anti-woke weird warriors sound good. In my opinion wiggy is a better word in this context.

This is how my online dictionary defines weird and wiggy:

Weird

weird | wird | adjective suggesting something supernatural; uncanny: the weird crying of a seal. • informal very strange; bizarre: a weird coincidence | all sorts of weird and wonderful characters. • archaic connected with fate.

Wiggy: 

wiggy | ˈwiɡē | 

adjective (wiggier, wiggiest) informal, mainly North American emotionally uncontrolled or weird: you've been acting all wiggy.

Since both word have the soft W sound wiggy can be used in phrases with anti-woke and warrior as an alliteration. Both words can mean bizarre. Wiggy adds emotionally uncontrolled to the definition. Therefore it describes the Republican war on wokeness. Not only does weird have a positive connotation, but another reason I'd like wiggy used instead is that weird is overused and wiggy is a far less used word.

Addendum:

We can thank Ron DeSantis for pushing the war against woke to and beyond the breaking point by going after Disney and continuing to dig in his heals in his utter bigotry. For example: 

DeSantis declines to say if he supports ‘mainstream human rights’

Here's one of my blogs about him.

Here's what an hysterical bigot had to say in a Fox News opinion piece.   I found his essay when I did my web search for woke and weird.

Here's what my tour around America taught me about the weird, woke and wicked

Here's what I'm hearing from panicked parents around the country

The author spews intolerance.

* "Why is there a seemingly sudden increase in pedophiles, sexual deviants? Why do we have so many amoral—or plainly immoral—educators, school administrators, school boards, politicians, community leaders, and even judges, hell-bent on advancing the sexualization of our innocent children, and pushing perversion into the hearts and minds of the most impressionable among us?

*Why are too many of these leaders hiding their aberrant "sex education" and "gender-affirming" curricula from the parents of their students, stripping moms and dads of their rights to determine when and how their children are exposed to sensitive topics in school?

* What do these groups of decadent influencers have to gain?  In short, their ambition is the total breakdown and collapse of the family. Their target is our children.  Their goal is social chaos.  In some cases, they have been successful. Tragically successful.

Thanks for reading. Scroll down to make comments and share on social media. The archives and tags are on the bottom of the main page. If you are reading on Booksie, Substack, or Medium click below to go to the blog web page. 

Click to go to main blog. Updates will be posted here rather that on Booksie, Substack, or Medium.

If you don't see the Disquis section below and want to comment this is the best place to do it. Click here and scroll down the page.

Weekly stats for the blog. Note the number of readers from Russia. I would like to have international readers comment about what they think about what is happening in America.

Click above to enlarge