Marcel Winatschek

The One True Emoji

Emojis have basically become our language, honestly. Little angels, pizza slices, yellow faces attempting to mean something. It’s kind of ridiculous and it mostly works. But there’s one that actually wins - the pile of shit with eyes.

The poop emoji doesn’t try. It’s crude, silly, completely shameless. That’s all it does. You can throw it into almost any conversation and it lands because there’s nothing beneath it except the obvious thing. Shit. With a dumb expression. That’s the whole message.

Everything else on the keyboard is designed to smooth things over, to make emotion digestible and safe. This one’s just crude and honest and completely uninterested in being anything else. Somehow that simplicity beats all the carefully crafted sentiment around it.