Me: Eggplant emoji did not make the list. Apparently we’re also supposed to stop using thumbs-up, okay fingers, kissy face, red hearts… The thumbs-up reaction is blue and is attached to the person’s text bubble. Me: The thumbs-up emoji is yellow and stand alone. But we’re Gen X so I guess we’re not supposed to? But I don’t know if I’m still cool because I never use the thumbs-up emoji but I’m always using the thumbs-up reaction and I don’t know if that’s different. Me: According to the internet Gen Z finds the thumbs up emoji passive-aggressive and hostile, but Gen X uses it all the time because they don’t understand. Victor: I don’t even know what that means but it sounds like something I already don’t do. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.Me: So apparently we’re supposed to stop thumbs-up emojying young people at work. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at for further information. RASCOE: For now at least, judging by our Slack messages today, we're keeping it alive - sincerely, though sometimes sarcastically, which is just the way we like it.Ĭopyright © 2022 NPR. HERRING: That's a question for future linguists. So bottom line, is the thumbs-up emoji really dead? Professor Herring says. Does my thumbs-up bother you? What about the check mark? Why can't people just use their words? Do you think I'm being passive-aggressive when I just say OK? Not when you say OK, but when you say k, that's aggressive.

I mean, we spent some quality time here at WEEKEND EDITION working through this. But the conversations sparked by those clickbait articles - like how people understand each other - were real. RASCOE: Now, a lot of young people online say they aren't that bothered by the thumbs-up emoji. They're always generating new expressions and new words and new ways of speaking to distinguish themselves in opposition to other groups that are perceived as being out of it or square, as we used to say back in the day. HERRING: It's characteristic of what young people do with language. RASCOE: Emojis are a part of modern language, and they can mean many things to many people all at once. HERRING: I think the battle here is really about the connotations of the emoji, the pragmatic meanings. She's a linguistics professor at Indiana University who specializes in digital communication. So, yeah, laughing to death, right? That's a great example. So now they need something that has a stronger impact, that's more outrageous or more over-the-top. SUSAN HERRING: So it's been bleached of its impact. Like, the skull face and the actually, like, sobbing emoji I feel just have more personality than just, like, haha. It doesn't feel as expressive as other things you can use. RASCOE: His daughter hates the thumbs-up, and she thinks the crying laughing emoji is weak. There's, like - there's an additional layer of kind of, like, sarcasm. It's very, like, straight, the way that I interpret it. And for me, like, the grimacing face just means, like, urgh, something bad is happening. JONAS DOWNEY: We sort of take it for granted thumbs-up means thumbs-up. Elder millennial Jonas Downey read one of the articles and decided to see if his 13-year-old daughter's interpretation of certain emojis differed from his. We may be victims of clickbait intended to stir up dissension between young and old, left and right, after someone dug up an old Reddit thread and presented it as gospel last week. So you may have heard the thumbs-up emoji is dead, as in not cool - don't do it.

Thumbs up emoji england meme