The Emoticon Generation Read Free

we have words for each and every thought or concept that occurs to us. It’s getting to the ridiculous point where words that shouldn’t exist, do. My favorite example for the over-richness of our language is this: ‘Mopery’ means the act of denuding oneself in front of a blind person. What occasion brought on the need for this word, one wonders. Was there an epidemic? How about ‘defenestration’, the act of throwing someone or something out a window? Another epidemic?
    Language started out with a poor vocabulary and grew and grew and grew over the last thousands of years. Alongside it, our knowledge grew just as quickly, and words were created to fit what we knew. In the last century and a half, our knowledge has grown by factors of thousands every decade. As knowledge increased, the vocabulary of specialized words increased with it. How many words do doctors know that you’ve never heard of? (Acrocyanosis, schistosomiasis, bilharziasis? No?) Engineers? (Asynchrony, aliasing, aceltahyde? Anything?) Physicists? (Fraunhofer lines? N-type semiconductor? Nothing?) Biologists? (Rectrices? Allula?) Computer programmers? (Alpha Skip? Metaheuristic?) Mathematicians? (Automorphism?) Journalists? (Nutgraf?)
    The more words we have, the less we need metaphors, similes, or lyricism. Is our great knowledge also our downfall? Are emoticons, as absurd and simple as they are as a vocabulary, bringing our poetry back? Would the new generation, Generation E, find lyricism again? Would it have to fall off vocabulary space and forget what we have worked so hard to know, to revive something of what we have lost? Because God knows, today’s kids don’t know many other words.
    This is what Anthony has been claiming all along: a small vocabulary is a plus. Here is how he describes his process, “When I write poetry, I forget everything I know, forget the words. I concentrate on feelings. A sentence of mine can be the sequence of feelings, emoticons, and the sequence is beautiful. Sometimes I put real words next to real emotions. The connection is beautiful.”
    Here is one of Anthony’s famous poems, called ‘Poetry’. For trademark purposes, we are not able to visually show the emoticons themselves. I wrote a short description between brackets in lieu of every emoticon. Hold on to your hats. You’re not going to like this.
    POETRY
By Anthony R
    Rhymes... [Sad face]
Meaning... [A face with its tongue out]
Symbolism... [A face, with its hand giving us a thumbs down]
Old School... [A face, with its hand giving us the finger]
Generation E... [A face, with its 2 hands giving us two thumbs up]
    Is Anthony’s point lessened, strengthened, or unaffected by the fact that you have now read his poetry?
    It doesn’t matter. Because emoticon poetry is but a speck in the inertia machine that is Generation E. On the one side is a single, next-generation poet on a dial-up connection, overwhelming the minds of the young from his mother’s basement in Blue Diamond, NV. On the other side is the business world. Oddly enough, the CEO whose products are most popular with today’s teenagers is echoing Anthony’s sentiments.
    “People don’t need words,” Mark Fox, CEO of Ping!, Inc., tells me. “People need attention.”
    We’re seated in the cafeteria of the spanking new offices of Ping! Fox had just bought an entire office building in downtown Chicago for the use of his up-and-coming high-tech company. Six months earlier, when he released his first product to the internet wild, no one had heard of him. Today, his product, the Ping!, is used even more than Twitter, and has just earned him a reported 1 billion in investment dollars.
    Mark Fox is a charming 30 year old man, neatly shaven, subtly new to suits, and much more grounded than you would expect a man who had just signed the deal of 10 lifetimes to be.
    “There are only two words people really need to be able to say,” Fox explains. “One says ‘give me attention’, the other says