Some words, like “click” and “murmur”, are anomatopoeitic — their sound evokes their meaning. But what about emoticons?<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
So here is an instance in which an emoticon not only looks like what it means, but also acts<\/i> like what it means. You could say this is an example of “onemotipoea”.<\/p>\n
I wonder how many other examples of this there are.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 … Continue reading “Onemotipoetic”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17342"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17342"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17342\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17346,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17342\/revisions\/17346"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}