I love word puzzles. Like Scrabble. Like the New York Times Spelling Bee. Like Wordle, now also owned by the NYT.
In all if these, everything you need is there, in plain sight, to be reassembled mentally to create new constructions.
Words. Challenging and when done well, so rewarding.
And I also love unravelling my clients’ pasts and helping them find verbal threads to reweave into new rich,. vibrant career tapestries ,as they tell their “why.” In words. Challenging and when done well, so rewarding.
So when I posted my weekly Back to Basics in my LinkedIn Newsletter the other day, it was another plea to my readers to use words to respond, not symbols, and it resulted in a successful conversation among me and 11 other wordsmiths who used letters, reconstructed to words, accumulated to phrases, girdered into to concepts, spreading ideas, enriching each other.
Some of my connections commented more than once. Nice, we conversed.
One comment was from was someone I do not even know. Nice, “buttinskys” (as my mother used to call them) are welcome.
Some emojied. Ugh. Even though I asked them not to.
So I Linked-shamed them into commenting, by calling them out, “Hey {name}, tell me why do you like this” to some of the 7 who already gave the post an emoji. Some took the bait and adjoined worded comments.
Others stood their emoji-ground. They emojied! Yes, they stood still in mentality, even after my asking for worded replies, NOT symbols.
What led them to emoji? Laziness? Inability to converse?
The answer cannot be time pressures. Why not add a sentence, or 2 or 3, because really, how long would it take to comment in a few words via keyboard?
Puzzling: why do people not use words to enrich us. The lowly emoji just doesn’t tell anyone in the conversation why you liked something.
Have we lost the creative use of language? Are we unable to comment in meaningful ways? (I sound like Carrie in “Sex inthe City” don’t I?)
Have we become so jaded that the silent thought process has degenerated to:
I’ll just give him a quick symbol that I liked it
instead of:
I think I’ll add to the global conversation around the topic he raised so others can benefit from my experience and thought leadership, as I demonstrate my ability to meaningfully add to the discussion?
For the 7 emoji-clickers, this is sent to you with great respect, hoping you will recognize that this coach is evoking the best from you that you can be. It’s in my DNA to work wordily.
You can write back a retort. In words. Or not, BUT PLEASE NO EMOJIS!
