Onemotipoetic

Some words, like “click” and “murmur”, are anomatopoeitic — their sound evokes their meaning. But what about emoticons?

Today somebody sent me a text that got me thinking about this. Because at the end of that text was a familiar little emoticon: <3

On an obvious level this is anomatopoetic, as are all emoticons, since its visual appearance evokes its meaning: In this case, it literally looks like a sideways heart. But this emoticon also works on another level.

After all, taken literally, the characters “<3” mean “less than three”. Which is, in fact, a description of how many people it takes to fall in love.

As they say, “two’s company, three’s a crowd”. We often talk about couples being in love, but rarely about triads being in love.

So here is an instance in which an emoticon not only looks like what it means, but also acts like what it means. You could say this is an example of “onemotipoea”.

I wonder how many other examples of this there are.