This is so interesting! My gen z friends very politely and considerately explained to me that my use of the crying laughing 😂 emoji to express that I found something very funny was actually really rather cringe, and I should use the chair 🪑 emoji instead to indicate something was so funny I almost fell off my chair laughing. Apparently it’s not as garish and it’s more nuanced and subtle.
I like that the kids are getting metonymous about it. They're being suggestive, abstract. The idea of sending an image of a chair to denote having laughed so hard you fell out of it almost feels like a piece of conceptual art.
As I said, when I joined Substack in July (2025), I came to Substack, for intelligent discussion, and Anna, you are it! And wonderful to meet you at Spirit Garden too :D Peace & Light
8,000 words about how Gen Z, or most modern young people, are in the process of losing their ability to understand the thoughts of others by reading words and so instead devolve into using crude pictures or emojis to communicate. Of course, the hidden rulers will dress up this new illiteracy in fancy colorful clothing and call it art. The crux of it: the melting emoji can mean any of a hundred different things, depending of who sees it. While a word like death, or snow, has at its center one meaning.
This being Substack, it's always a relief when a cryptic comment turns out to be a reference to some youth meme I'm too rickety to recognize and not, like, Hitler's shoe size or something.
Things are going to slide,
slide in all directions.
Won't be nothing,
nothing you can measure any more.
- Leonard Cohen
This is so interesting! My gen z friends very politely and considerately explained to me that my use of the crying laughing 😂 emoji to express that I found something very funny was actually really rather cringe, and I should use the chair 🪑 emoji instead to indicate something was so funny I almost fell off my chair laughing. Apparently it’s not as garish and it’s more nuanced and subtle.
I respect the chair's stolid expressionless physicality, and also that we've apparently gone back to ROFL as the ne plus ultra of laughing online.
I like that the kids are getting metonymous about it. They're being suggestive, abstract. The idea of sending an image of a chair to denote having laughed so hard you fell out of it almost feels like a piece of conceptual art.
As I said, when I joined Substack in July (2025), I came to Substack, for intelligent discussion, and Anna, you are it! And wonderful to meet you at Spirit Garden too :D Peace & Light
Aw Shayla thank you!
8,000 words about how Gen Z, or most modern young people, are in the process of losing their ability to understand the thoughts of others by reading words and so instead devolve into using crude pictures or emojis to communicate. Of course, the hidden rulers will dress up this new illiteracy in fancy colorful clothing and call it art. The crux of it: the melting emoji can mean any of a hundred different things, depending of who sees it. While a word like death, or snow, has at its center one meaning.
6-7
This being Substack, it's always a relief when a cryptic comment turns out to be a reference to some youth meme I'm too rickety to recognize and not, like, Hitler's shoe size or something.
I recognize it only because my teenaged sons “explained” it to me.
I have to wonder if Waxing Gibbous is some sort of Moonie.
Regarding the spread of "melting," I'll suggest that the trend-setter here was Joe Biden himself, as his brain turned into mashed potatoes.