In recent weeks, two generations on the internet have been bumping into videos and comments on TikTok about the characteristics of the millennial culture now considered by Gen Z to be cool. The list includes skinny jeans (Gen Z pronunciation: set it on fire) parts (Gen Z pronunciation: middle part or bust) and perhaps most painful of all, the popular laughing crying emoji that some millennials, myself, hundreds of times per day or more use.
‘What’s wrong with the laughing emoji[?], “one user asked in a TikTok comment. Another replied, ‘it’s that way.’ I say you should use that emoji bc [because] we are definitely not going. ‘
“I use everything but the laughing emoji,” 21-year-old Walid Mohammed told CNN Business. “I stopped using it a while ago because I saw older people using it, like my mom, my older siblings and just older people in general.”
For many Gen Z-ers, the skull emoji has become a popular substitute for transmitting laughter. This is the visual version of the slang phrase ‘I’m dead’ or ‘I die’, which means something very funny. Other acceptable alternatives: the emoji (officially called “Loudly Crying Face”), or to just write “lol” (laugh out loud) or “lmao” (laugh me, well, you probably know the rest).
Seventeen-year-old Xavier Martin calls the ‘laughter’ emoji ‘faint’ and says ‘not too many people’ at his age use it. Stacy Thiru (21) prefers the real crying emoji because it shows a more extreme emotion and feels more dramatic. She said she could not find the laughing crying emoji on her iPhone’s keyboard.
A similar emoji, called ‘Rolling on the Floor Laughing’, is also no longer in vogue. When Thiru asked him about a video call, he visibly made up. “I do not like this one,” she said. “My mom doesn’t even use it.”
“Face with Tears of Joy”, the official name for the laughing crying emoji, is currently the most used emoji on Emojitracker, a website that shows the use of emojis on Twitter in real time. It is at the top of Emojipedia’s list of the most used emojis on Twitter in 2020, while the “Loudly Crying Face” took second place. And it has endurance: in 2017, Apple said the laughing crying emoji were the most popular in the United States.
“Tears of Joy was a victim of its own success,” said Gretchen McCulloch, an Internet linguist and author of “Because the Internet: Understanding the New Language Rules.”
“If your digital laughter indicates years and years in the same way, it starts to feel sincere. … The hyperbole is worn out by continued use,” she said. Therefore, Gen Zers may be looking for fresh and new ways to indicate that they are laughing in different ways.
Gen Zers – born after 1996 – grew up in a time when the internet was ubiquitous and often in the palm of their hands. Some millennials remember, by comparison, a time before continuous internet immersion; many start in the world of emojis and internet jargon, not through text messages or social networks, but through AOL Instant Messenger. (Millennials were born between 1981 and 1996, according to the Pew Research Center).
Anecdotally, older generations tend to use emojis literally while younger people get more creative, said Jeremy Burge, the chief emoji officer of Emojipedia, a website for emoji dictionaries. Emojipedia recently wrote a blog post: “It’s common wisdom on TikTok that the laughing crying emoji are for boomers.”
Gen Zers told CNN Business that they would like to assign their own meanings to emojis, which are then distributed to others in their group, often via social media. For example, the emoji of a person wearing a cowboy hat () and one of a person standing upright both indicated discomfort. Others will string together a bunch of positive emoji, such as stars, rainbows and fairies, and then link it to something negative. “Our generation is very sarcastic,” Martin said.
Sometimes teens and twenties use emoji – like the laughing cry – ironically, like sending six or seven of them in a row to friends, to exaggerate. But overall, those emoji are a no-go.
“For Gen Z, it’s just like having an Android,” Mohammed said.
The video in the media player above was used in a previous report.
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