In recent weeks, two smart generations on the internet have clashed in videos and comments on TikTok about the signs of millennial culture, which are now considered unclear by Gen Z. The list includes skinny jeans (Gen Z verdict: put them on fire), side part (Gen Z verdict: middle part or bust) and perhaps the most painful of all, the popular crying laughter emoji that some millennials, myself included, use hundreds of times a day or more.
“What’s wrong with the laughing emoji[?]asked one user in a TikTok comment. Another replied, “It’s so off.” In a different video of a woman saying she gave up using it after the kids didn’t learn, a teenager commented: “At the age of 15 I say you should use that bc emoji [because] we certainly won’t do that. “
“I use everything except the laughing emoji,” 21-year-old Walid Mohammed told CNN Business. “I stopped using it some time ago because I saw older people using it, such as my mother, my older siblings, and only the elderly in general.”
For many of the Z geniuses, the skull emoji has become a popular substitute for laughter. It’s the visual version of the slang phrase “I’m dead” or “I’m dying”, which means something is very funny. Other acceptable alternatives: emoji (officially called “Face crying out loud”), or just writing “lol” (laughing out loud) or “lmao” (laughing at me, well, you probably know the rest).
Seventeen-year-old Xavier Martin called emoji “crying” “fad” and said “not too many people” use it at his age. 21-year-old Stacy Thiru prefers the real weeping emoji because she shows a more extreme emotion and feels more dramatic. She said she couldn’t even find the laughing emojis on her iPhone’s keyboard.
A similar emoji, called “Rolling on the Floor Laughing”, is no longer fashionable. When asked about that emoji following a video call, Thiru made a visible grimace. “I don’t like that,” she said. “My mother doesn’t even use it.”
“Tears of Joy”, the official name for laughing emojis, is currently the most used emoji on Emojitracker, a website that shows the use of real-time emojis on Twitter. It topped the Emojipedia list of the most used emojis on Twitter in 2020, while “Face crying out loud” took second place. And it has the power to maintain: in 2017, Apple said that the laughing crying emoji was the most popular in the United States.
“Tears of joy were the victims of their own success,” said Gretchen McCulloch, an Internet linguist and author of “Because the Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language.”
“If you indicate digital laughter for years and years in the same way, it starts to feel insincere … Hyperbole wears out through continuous use,” she said. That’s why Gen Zers can look for new and new ways to signal that I’m laughing in different ways.
Gen Zers – born after 1996 – grew up at a time when the internet was already ubiquitous and often in the palms of their hands. Some millennials, by comparison, remember a time before the constant immersion in the internet; many have ventured into the world of emojis and jargon on the Internet not through text messaging or social networking, 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 become more creative, said Jeremy Burge, director of emoji at Emojipedia, an emoji dictionary site. Emojipedia recently wrote a blog post that said, “It’s common sense on TikTok that the laughing crying emoji is for boomers.”
Gen Zers told CNN Business that they like to attribute their own meanings to emojis, which are then spread to others in their cohort, often through social media. For example, the emoji of a person wearing a cowboy hat () and that of a person simply standing came to mean clumsiness. Others will collect a bunch of positive emojis, such as stars, rainbows and fairies, and then pair them with something negative. “Our generation is very sarcastic,” Martin said.
Sometimes teenagers and twenties use emoji – like the one who laughs – full of irony, such as sending six or seven of them in turn to friends, to exaggerate it. But in general, this emoji is not mandatory.
“For Gen Z, it’s like having an Android,” Mohammed said.
The video in the media player above was used in a previous report.
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