SMILEYS FOR FEELINGS & EMOTIONS

Because today is blue Monday, a day of mixed feelings and emotions, our post is about adjectives that express them. Welcome back to school!

More about feelings on previous posts HERE

THE WORLD'S MOST USED 'EMOJIS'

 (6th Cultural Week-14: Writing in the 21st century)

Emoticons, 'emojis' or smileys are certainly the new way of communicating of the digital era. Emoticons have come a long way since the days of :-) and they are already 32 years old. 
Link:The emoticon celebrates its 30th birthday (Sept'12)

Thanks to "emojis" (from Japanese = "picture character") we can express complex emotions and ideas in a simple way when textmessaging,whatsapping or tweeting.

There are different rankings showing the most used emoticons throughout the world.

On this post we can see some ranking results, above and on the left. 

The latter was a survey carried out in 2014 by Matthew Rothenberg on Twitter in real time. The survey was made counting tweets in many languages from Arabic to Chinese, English... and the resulting TOP 100 is the one on the left. Hearts top the list by far and love is also prominent.

If we are to answer the previous question, these are the results from 2014:
- These are the leading countries of each emoticon family:
babies - Latin America
cats - Brazil
female themed icons - the UK
violence - Canada
holidays - Australia
parties/'fiestas' - Spain
sadness - USA Hispanics
hearts - France
happy faces - Turkey
romanticism - Russia
flowers - Arab countries
hand signs - Malaysia
- The French use the heart icon, in any of its versions, four times more than average. Russians use romantic icons (kisses, love-letters, kissing couples) three times more than average.
- USA is the worldwide leader in the use of the chicken thigh, the aubergine (this use considered obscene), the birthday cake and the money bag.
- French & Vietnamese are the ones who seldom use smileys related to homosexuality, such as the rainbow or same-sex couples holding hands.
- The smiling poo is mostly used in the USA, the UK and Brazil. It's considered a funny emoji, but Russians don't seem to like it much.

More and more people have fun using emoticons to write the names of songs, films, sentences, short stories.

Here are some funny ones we've found:
- Can you decode this message?

(Scroll to the end of the post for the translation*)

- A summary of "Les Miserables"

*Translation: "Writing in longhand takes too much time and space, so in the future this newspaper will be written entirely in emoticons and sent directly to your mobile phone."

WRITING IN THE XXIst CENTURY: A REMINDER OF THE PROJECTS PROPOSED BY THE ENGLISH DEPARTMENT FOR THE 6th CULTURAL WEEK

 (6th Cultural Week-6: Writing in the 21st century)

Here's a reminder of the projects we have proposed from the Department of English to participate in the 6th Cultural Week: The History of Handwriting. You can link from here to the original posts on this blog. You can participate in one, two... or all of them. The best will be exhibited and used as quizzes during the cultural week.

- PROJECT 1 - TEXT MESSAGING:

WRITE TEXT MESSAGES IN ENGLISH USING ABBREVIATIONS FOR OTHER STUDENTS TO DECODE INTO ENGLISH & ALSO TRANSLATE INTO GALICIAN/SPANISH.

PROJECT 2 - LITERARY HANDWRITTEN QUOTATIONS:
GIVE A HANDWRITTEN LITERARY QUOTATION IN ENGLISH OF A BOOK YOU'VE ENJOYED.

- PROJECT 3 - SMILEYS/EMOTICONS:
WRITE MESSAGES USING SMILEYS/EMOTICONS FOR OTHER STUDENTS TO DECODE INTO ENGLISH & ALSO TRANSLATE INTO GALICIAN/SPANISH.

- PROJECT 4 - TWEETS:

WRITE ORIGINAL OR FUNNY TWEETS IN ENGLISH. REMEMBER NOT MORE THAN 140 LETTERS. YOU MAY USE ABBREVIATIONS LIKE WHEN TEXT MESSAGING.

- PROJECT 5 - PICTOGRAMS:

a) CREATE YOUR OWN PICTOGRAMS. MAKE PEOPLE GUESS WHAT THEY MEAN. ANSWERS MUST BE SHOWN IN ENGLISH.

b) DO YOU KNOW ABOUT ANY OTHER SET OF PICTOGRAMS WIDELY USED? FIND OTHERS, THEIR MEANINGS MUST BE LATER GUESSED & WRITTEN IN ENGLISH BY OTHER STUDENTS.

WRITING IN THE XXIst CENTURY: SMILEYS OR EMOTICONS

 (6th Cultural Week-3: Writing in the 21st century)

Technologies have stirred up the way we communicate in writing. Text messages and Whatsapp have made us use all kinds of abbreviations and smileys o emoticons. Is this the way handwriting is changing for the future? Is digitalwriting and smileys the future?

Here are some charts with basic meanings of smileys.

- PROJECT 3 FOR THE CULTURAL WEEK IN ENGLISH:

- WRITE MESSAGES USING SMILEYS/EMOTICONS FOR OTHER STUDENTS TO DECODE INTO ENGLISH & ALSO TRANSLATE INTO GALICIAN/SPANISH.

GOODBYE HANDWRITING?

 (6th Cultural Week-2: Writing in the 21st century)

TODAY IS NATIONAL HANDWRITING DAY 

IN U.S.A. & BRITAIN

Today is National Handwriting Day in USA and Britain and this course, our Cultural Week (the 6th) will be devoted to the History of Handwriting. Last November we learnt that Finland, one of the countries with the highest quality education in the world, has decided to stop paying attenction to handwriting teaching in school and will concentrate on teaching keyboard writing.

Is handwriting out of fashion? Is it from the past century? Handwriting isn't that important? Isn't our own handwriting part of our personality? Arguments for and against have appeared since the news was known. In the history of handwriting, will this mean the end of an era? The end of handwriting?

- WRITING BY HAND: SO 20th CENTURY...
(Enrique Dans. 30-Nov-2014)

(Handwritten quotation from J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter & The Philosopher's Stone")

Above a photo of a handwritten quotation on the BooksBlog of the British newspaper The Guardian, which to celebrate this National Handwriting Day, today, has published inspiring written literary quotations, handwritten by their readers. Click on this link to see them all.

The English Department is going to work on how communicating via writing has changed in the XXIst century. Different posts will be following to show these changes and propose different projects to be done in English for the Cultural Week exhibits and quizzes. Such as:

- MOBILE TEXT-MESSAGING. (The only post which has been published previously)

- SMILEYS & EMOTICONS.

- TWEETS.

- PICTOGRAMS.
(The last three will have following posts published very soon) 
Stay tuned and participate in the proposed projects. Thanks.
Here's the second one:

PROJECT 2 FOR THE CULTURAL WEEK IN ENGLISH:

- GIVE A HANDWRITTEN LITERARY QUOTATION IN ENGLISH OF A BOOK YOU'VE ENJOYED.

Galician version of this post @ ArquivosDoTrasno.