Jörg Carstensen/Picture alliance via Getty Images

The pandemic has affected nearly all aspects of modern life, from the clothes we wear to the food we eat to how we spend our time. There is one thing, however, that has remained almost unchanged: the emojis we send.

疫情几乎影响到了现代生活的方方面面,从我们穿的衣服到我们吃的食物,再到我们打发时间的方式。然而,有一件事几乎没有改变:我们发送的表情符号。

According to data from the Unicode Consortium, the organization that maintains the standards for digital text, nine of the 10 most used emojis from 2019 (which was the last time they released data) also ranked among the top 10 this year. The red heart emoji held the No. 2 spot, and the tears of joy emoji ranked No. 1, despite members of Gen Z deeming it uncool (along with side parts and skinny jeans).

根据维护数字文本标准的组织统一码联盟的数据,2019年(这是他们上一次发布数据的年份)最常用的10个表情符号中,有九个今年仍跻身前10名。红心表情排在第二位,笑哭表情排第一,尽管Z世代人认为它老土(他们认为老土的还有偏分发型和紧身牛仔裤)。

To the people who create and study emojis, the persistence of tears of joy, also known as the laughing-crying emoji, comes as no surprise.

对于创造和研究表情符号的人来说,喜悦的眼泪(也称笑哭)表情的连续上榜并不令人惊讶。

“It speaks to how many people use emoji. If emoji were a purely Gen Z thing, then you wouldn’t see it so highly ranked,” said Alexander Robertson, an emoji researcher at Google. “Because of the sheer number of people using emoji, even if one group thinks something is lame, they have to be a really big group to affect these statistics.”

“这说明很多人都在使用表情符号。如果表情符号纯粹是Z世代的东西,那么你就不会看到它排名如此之高,”谷歌表情符号研究员亚历山大·罗伯逊说。“由于使用表情符号的人数众多,即使有一个群体觉得某个表情蹩脚,那这个群体必须非常大才能影响这些统计数据。”

And it makes sense that Gen Z would think that certain emojis aren’t hip, said Jennifer Daniel, an emoji subcommittee chair for Unicode and a creative director at Google. It’s part of the “teenage experience of creating a sense of subculture where there’s a right way and a wrong way of behaving.”

统一码表情符号小组委员会主席兼谷歌创意总监詹妮弗·丹尼尔表示,Z世代认为某些表情符号不时髦是可以理解的。这是“青少年体验的一部分,他们创造一种亚文化感,在这种亚文化里,有正确的行为方式和错误的行为方式”。

Plus, Ms. Daniel noted, there is a “spectrum” of laughter that can be expressed through text: “There’s light chuckling. There’s acknowledgment laughter, which is just a marker of empathy.” Using emojis, such as the skull face (“I’m dead”) or crying face (uncontrollable tears of laughter), can help to illustrate that range.

此外,丹尼尔指出,文字可以用来表达各种各样的笑声:“有轻轻一笑。有认同地笑,表示一下共情。”使用表情符号,例如骷髅脸(“我死了”)或哭脸(笑到哭了出来),可以帮助体现这些不同。

Looking at a singular platform, however, might tell a slightly different story. According to data obtained from Twitter, tears of joy was the most tweeted emoji in 2020, but got bumped down to No. 2 this year, with the crying face taking its place. Tears of joy saw a 23 percent decline in usage from 2020 to 2021.

然而,当我们将目光移到单一平台上,情况可能略有不同。根据Twitter上的数据,笑哭是2020年推文中出现最多的表情符号,但今年被挤到了第二位,取而代之的是哭脸。从2020年到2021年,笑哭表情的使用量下降了23%。

But the fact that most of the rest of the top 10 in Unicode’s data set, which covers multiple platforms and apps, stayed fairly consistent also signifies just how flexible the current set of emojis are.

但事实上,统一码数据——涵盖多个平台和应用程序——前10名里的其他表情的排名大多与过去保持一致,这也表明目前这些表情符号的使用有多么灵活。

“It basically indicates that we have what we need to communicate a broad range of expression, or even very specific concepts,” Ms. Daniel said. “You don’t necessarily need a Covid emoji or a vaccination emoji because you have biceps, syringe, Band-Aid, which conveys semantically the same thing.” Ms. Daniel added that at the start of the pandemic, people used the microbe, or virus, emoji and the crown emoji to refer to Covid (in Spanish, “corona” translates to “crown”).

“这基本上表明,在表达一系列情感,甚至是表达非常具体的概念时,我们拥有我们所需要的东西,”丹尼尔说。“你不一定需要一个新冠病毒表情符号或疫苗接种表情符号,因为你有二头肌、注射器、创可贴表情符号,它们在语义上传达的是相同的东西。”丹尼尔还说,在疫情开始时,人们使用微生物或病毒表情符号和皇冠表情符号来指代新冠病毒(在西班牙语中,“corona”意为“皇冠”)。

The syringe emoji jumped to 193rd place this year in terms of overall usage, compared to 282nd in 2019. The microbe also rose, from 1,086th in 2019 to 477th.

在总体使用统计上,注射器表情符号今年跃升至第193位,而2019年为第282位。微生物表情符号也从2019年的第1086位上升至第477位。

Though the past two years have been like none before, the range of emotions we expressed through emoji while living through them were still largely familiar.

尽管过去的两年与以往十分不同,但我们在生活中通过表情符号表达的各种情感仍然基本相似。

“We did see a rise in the use of the virus emoji, but not in a way that even made it remotely into the most-commonly used emojis because we still had plenty to laugh about and plenty to cry about, whether it was because of the pandemic or not,” said Lauren Gawne, co-host of the podcast “Lingthusiasm” and a senior lecturer in linguistics at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia.

“我们确实看到病毒表情符号的使用有所增加,但它并没有成为最常用的表情符号,因为仍然有很多让我们笑和哭的事情,无论是否是因为疫情,”播客“Lingthusiasm”的联合主持人、澳大利亚墨尔本拉筹伯大学语言学高级讲师劳伦·高恩说。

“Even in the midst of this massive global pandemic that preoccupied so much of our time,” Ms. Gawne added, “we still spent a lot of time wishing each other happy birthday or checking in or laughing about some new and unexpected element of this slow-burning weirdness.”

高恩还说:“即使这场大规模的全球大流行病占据了我们那么多时间,我们仍然花了很多时间送出生日快乐的祝福,或者确认安全,或笑看这场进程缓慢的怪诞闹剧中突发的新元素。”

翻译:明斋

点击查看本文英文版。