IT is hard to fathom why Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year this time is not even a word but rather a symbol you often see appearing in your handphone messages — the smiley sort with tears of joy. They call that childish symbol emoji. Goodness me, I don’t know what that means either, just that it sounds so Japanese.
Word of the year is normally chosen from significantly dominant expressions but the thing to note is, has Oxford English Dictionary, which in itself boasts of 600,000 entries covering over 1,000 years, actually run out of clear-cut words for the distinction? Or has that electronic symbol been too overwhelming to ignore over the whole of this year? To give a better perspective, it has to be noted that the dictionary’s word for last year was vape and the year before that, selfie. Yes, both these terms have created more than a sensation in this country as well.
Be that as it may, so has emoji. Almost every other electronic message you receive on your phone application is bound to carry the emotional codes of smiling, crying or laughing symbols. Extensions include the thumbs up or thumbs down symbols or the two-finger peace sign. The smiley has caught the world by storm. Hence, Oxford Dictionary has found it appropriate to pick it as the word of the year.
Which raises the next question: by making a symbol as word of the year, does it mean we are really losing or have lost it altogether to the old art of sentence construction? To me it is another blow to the old romance of writing. For instance, instead of saying it the old-fashioned way: “This is to inform you that I thoroughly enjoyed your joke and could not help but burst out laughing loud hahaha”, one cheeky little symbol of the emoji does the work of 20 words. Splash and it says it all. Reduce the clutter.
Probably the world is into word-savers. Add that to all sorts of abbreviated words now commonly used in electronic messages and we see a clear transformation of where our forms of communication are heading. “Hw u tday” and answer: (thumbs up symbol).
Coincidentally, Merriam-Webster, another international dictionary, has also picked less than a word as word of the year, picking the suffix “ism” for the honours.
The Associated Press reported that the top “isms” to earn high traffic spikes and big bumps in lookups on the dictionary company’s website this year over the year before were socialism, fascism, racism, feminism, communism, capitalism and terrorism. Malaysia went through that quite as well not too long ago with cronyism, nepotism and all kinds of sarcasms.
Dictionary.com, on the other hand, chose identity as its word for 2015 to signify a year when gender, race, sexuality and nationality have dominated the news.
“Over the past year, headlines tied to gender, sexuality and race dominated the news,” Time magazine reported. “In particular, many of the year’s biggest stories focused on the way in which individuals or members of a group are perceived, understood, accepted or shut out.”
Editors said they picked identity after they saw spikes in lookups for words such as transgender, cisgender and microaggression, which Dictionary.com defines as “a subtle but offensive comment or action directed at a minority or other non-dominant group that is often unintentional or unconsciously reinforces a stereotype”.
What about word of the year in Malaysia, the word that is not only often used but rings with significance in 2015? Nothing doing with the notoriety that they might bring but it is not hard actually to pick from this few — Oil, GST and Ringgit.
The writer is former NST group editor