What makes the Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year funny

I think my colleague might be Nostradamus. Because almost a month back, she wrote a piece on how emojis are slowly replacing words and sure enough, the Oxford Dictionary named the emoji the ‘word’ of the year. Precisely, it’s the emoji that is letting out tears of joy. Technically, it’s a pictograph. It’s as much a word as ‘irregardless’ is... Regardless of this year’s shortlist that included words and phrases such as ‘on fleek’, the Ron Swanson-made popular ‘lumbersexual’, and the confusing ‘they’ which refers to a person of unspecified sex, tears of joy was chosen. (If you’re curious, take the ‘How well do you know your emojis’ quiz on their blog.)
So why was this emoji chosen in particular? As they write in their blog, “Emojis (the plural can be either emoji or emojis) have been around since the late 1990s, but 2015 saw their use, and use of the word emoji, increase hugely.” Partnering with the smart prediction keyboard technology, SwiftKey, the Oxford University Press (which owns Oxford Dictionaries), explored frequency and usage statistics for popular emojis around the world and found that the ‘tears of joy’ emoji was the most used: “20 per cent of all the emojis used in the UK in 2015, and 17 per cent of those in the US.” They also found that although the word emoji has been found in English since 1997, “usage more than tripled in 2015 over the previous year.”
Some of the previous winners include ‘vape’ (check out Stephen Colbert discovering its joys in a video), ‘selfie’ (which is still around and is one of the most important issues humanity has to address) and ‘locavore’ (those annoying beings who eat only locally-grown food). Many in the media describe this year’s selection as a “cop-out”, citing that more diverse emojis have come into place, which have more meaning than a face with happy tears. Maybe they were just trying to make ‘fetch’ happen and if Mean Girls’ Gretchen Wieners were real, we’d bet she’d be quite happy right now.