Do smileys ever have a nose?
Emoticons are a good way of representing what gets lost when
we switch from speaking to texting. We can’t use intonation or facial
expressions to show whether we’re joking or are sad, so we use an emoticon to
do the job. The emoticons people use can vary, though, as Tyler Schnoebelen discovered
when he analysed nearly 4 million American English tweets that included at
least one of the most frequently used emoticons. Just some of the variations
that people used are shown in the Table.
|
shorthand
|
emoticon
|
Number in the corpus
|
Percentage of all emoticons in the
corpus
|
|
smile
|
: )
|
1,496,585
|
39.6
|
|
wink
|
; )
|
397,745
|
10.5
|
|
frown
|
: (
|
312,769
|
8.3
|
|
big smile
|
: D
|
281,907
|
7.5
|
|
smile/nose
|
: -)
|
183,131
|
4.9
|
|
wink/nose
|
; -)
|
70,
618
|
1.9
|
|
frown/nose
|
: -(
|
27,561
|
0.7
|
Counts and percentages of emoticons in the American
English Twitter corpus analysed by Schnoebelen
Schnoebelen showed that the variants corresponded to different
types of users, tweeting with different vocabularies. His statistical analyses
revealed that the most pervasive distinction was between emoticons with noses
and those without noses. He therefore set out to discover whether emoticons with
and without a nose, such as :) and :-) , mean the same thing. He did this by
looking at how they patterned with other aspects of tweets.
Tweets cannot be longer than 140 characters, so you might
expect people who send longer tweets to use emoticons without a nose, to save a
character. But it turned out that people who used noses wrote longer tweets,
not shorter ones. They also avoided abbreviations like thru. These ‘nosers’ made few typos and spelt words correctly. Overall,
then, their language could be described as more standard. The ‘non-nosers’, by
contrast, seemed to want to be more non-standard.
They tended to mis-spell words such as ‘tomorrow’ as tommorow, they dropped
the apostrophe in contractions such as wasn’t,
and they used more taboo words and more expressively lengthened words (like soooo or yummm). They also used more emoticons overall. They seemed to be
younger than the ‘nosers’, keeping up with a younger set of celebrities and sending
them positive vibes.
Schnoebelen explains that emoticons with noses were the first
to be used, so for a while they were the historically ‘standard’ forms. This
meant that people who were interested in presenting themselves as nonstandard
had to change them, and remove the noses.
So, do emoticons with noses mean the same as those without a
nose? Schnoebelen reminds us that meaning is an emergent property of social
relations, not something that a symbol has in itself. He gives as an example a
bouquet of roses, which is meaningful because there are lovers, patients,
doctors and florists to give it meaning: the interpretation is shared by people
we’re familiar with, using familiar interpretive schemes. To understand the
meaning of emoticons, then, we need to think not only about the emotions they
can convey but also who uses them and when. A smiley can tell us how the person
feels about what they are tweeting, but it also tells us something about the
kind of relationship they want to establish with the people they are tweeting.
_____________________________________________________
Schnoebelen, Tyler (2012) Do You Smile with Your
Nose? Stylistic Variation in Twitter Emoticons. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 18 (2):
117-125
Posted at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol18/iss2/14
