All shook up
World emoji day, emotions and masks, and a #fridayfeeling in honor of one of the newest proposed emojis—shook.
The Feels Guide documents where emotion and tech mix and mingle. Thanks for reading! 😊❤️️🌞
The emoji you didn’t know you needed
We all 💖 love emojis and this week it was time to 🎉 celebrate them! July 17 is 🌏 World Emoji Day selected because it’s the date on the 📅 calendar emoji, which (which was selected because that’s the date that iCal for Mac was first announced at MacWorld Expo in 2002). The special day was created by 📙 Emojipedia founder Jeremy Burge in 2014. While there are no formal celebrations, some people host 🙌 events, others like to get 🎨 creative with emoji art, and others use the hashtag #WorldEmojiDay to share their favorites which are probably from these top 10 most used emoji.
Tears of Joy Face 😂
Loudly Crying Face 😭
Smiling Face With Heart-Eyes 😍
Red Heart ❤️
Index Pointing Right 👉
Purple Heart 💜
Two Hearts 💕
Smiling Face With Smiling Eyes 😊
Thinking Face 🤔
Folded Hands 🙏
Just before World Emoji Day, selected submissions for Emoji 15.0 were announced, including a pushing hand, a shaking face (or I’m SHOOK), a moose, a goose, the long-awaited pink heart, and a wifi sign. The draft versions will likely get approval from the Unicode consortium in September.
If you’re not a fan of emojis, a recent trend report by Adobe might change your mind. A survey of 7000 people from around the world found that 88% of people felt more empathetic 🤗 toward someone if they used an emoji, and 66% of people liked it when emojis were used at work. The study also found that using the eggplant and peach emojis — symbols associated with “sexting” — made people less likable with romantic interests. So choose your emoji wisely!
Emotions (un)masked 😷
Early in the pandemic, we wondered whether we could read someone’s emotional expression while wearing a mask. Would we be able to read a reaction in conversation? How would we exchange a smile with someone while we crossed paths? Could we understand when someone felt confused at a meeting or in a classroom?
The accepted idea has been that masks do have a negative influence on people’s ability to read emotions and interact with each other. That idea was challenged this week. A new study by psychologists from Durham University in the UK, published in Frontiers in Neuroscience, found that people can identify emotions of mask-wearers when the whole body is visible.
The researchers carried out this experiment with 70 participants using Van den Stock and de Gelder’s (2011) Bodily Expressive Action Stimulus Test or BEAST image set. The set—one of many emotion datasets used in research—is composed of 254 whole-body expressions of 4 emotions (anger, fear, happiness, and sadness). In this study, researchers added a face mask to see whether participants could recognize the emotion.
Short story, we can read emotion in others through a combination of upper face, posture, and gesture. Keep in mind that these are exaggerated poses which make it a little easier to distinguish between emotions. But these are static pictures too. If participants were actually interacting with people, there would be other cues like tone of voice and gaze and movement which would make it even easier to read another person’s emotions.
So masks may not interfere with our social interactions as much as previously thought. But if you want to be extra sure (and a little Black Mirror) you could adopt something like Simone Rebaudango’s Unmask. The speculative design pre-dates the pandemic. The artist was living in China, where wearing a mask was (and still is) common because of air quality issues. The Unmask is a hack that can recognize a few emotional expressions underneath the mask with sensors and then light up the mask to mimic that expression.
Clear masks, voice-activated LED masks, and other real-life hacks never really took hold and probably because we can use the rest of our faces and our bodies to signal the emotions we want to show.
Friday Feeling > Shook
🔑 DEFINITION
Shook is a form of awestruck confusion but can be used to describe feelings ranging from fear to shock to elation.
See also: Shooketh, 0_0, And I oop, I can’t
📜 A BRIEF HISTORY
Grammatically speaking, when we transform verbs like shake into adjectives, we typically use something called a participle. The present participle of shake is shaking, as in “I’m shaking” and the past participle is “I’m shaken.” But that’s just not so when it comes to shook.
It started in the the 19th century, when Long John Silver admits that he was “shook” in Robert Louis Stevenson’s adventure classic Treasure Island. In 1897, Dan Troop exclaims, “Well, you was shook up and silly.” in Rudyard Kipling’s Captains Courageous. After that, according to the Google Books Ngram Viewer “I’m shook” had its up and downs in the early 20th century until crossing over to pop culture, music in particular.
Staring in the 1950s, there’s Elvis Presley’s All Shook Up. In James Brown’s 1969 I’m Shook, the usage comes close to how we use it today. Rapper Mobb Deep took the feeling into modern times with Shook Ones in the 1990s. Hip-hop’s use of it—see Bruno Mars’ Finesse remix with Cardi B—brought it into the mainstream.
Back in the day, shook was often used as a substitute for feeling rattled or even afraid—more like “shaking in my boots”. It gradually became more common to use it when struck speechless from an unexpected realization. The current-day usage of shook-as-awestruck-confusion became more popular **Urban Dictionary proposed “shocked or surprised AF” as a definition for shook in 2016.
Shooketh, a variation on shook, became popular in 2017 when comedian Christine Sydelko expressed exaggerated shock at being addressed by name by a cashier in a popular YouTube video. Shook is already an exaggeration reaction, shooketh adds a dash of sarcasm. With a global pandemic, massive weather events, and political upheaval all feeling rather biblical, shooketh may be more relevant than ever.
💬 EXPRESSION
Shook is an amplifier for expressing several emotions. It’s perfectly appropriate when something mundane takes a turn for the weird, awkward or unexpected like, “I just saw a woman get mobbed by seagulls and they swarmed her ice cream. It was horrific I am so SHOOK.” Conversely, it can also be used when a situation turns out as you expected yet you are still surprised as in “I got a scholarship for USC omfg. I. AM. SHOOK.”
Of course, it can translate to a hyperbolic level of fluster at the charm of a hot celebrity or a cute dog as in “Timothee Chalamet just followed me on Instagram. I am sh00k.” Shooketh adds a wry dramatic flourish to express mock surprise or dismay, the equivalent of gobsmacked or flabbergasted.
It can show that you are worried, as in “I can’t believe I have to present this in front of everyone, I’m shook.” Or it can level an insult, for instance, “Did you eat that all pizza by yourself? I’m shook.”
Do a quick scan of Giphy or Twitter’s reactions and you’ll see a wide range of expressions all under the shook umbrella. There’s the mild surprise of Kimmy Schmidt’s Titus Andremedon at the computer, the comic overreaction by Seth Myers at his late-night desk, and the pure drama of Lucille’s collapse to the floor (from Arrested Development). But by far the most common is the Blinking White Guy.
💗 EXPERIENCE
Like so many internet emotions, this one is exaggerated in expression but muted in experience. You might say you’re shook when you are afraid, amazed, astonished, awestruck, confused, dumbfounded, flabbergasted, shocked, surprised, unsurprised, or worried. But you probably don’t feel any of those things. Rather than a frazzled feeling of many emotions at once, it’s more likely you feel mildly amused. You might also experience little anticipation when you await a response and feel a bit of in-group bonding afterward.
❝ QUOTE
“I’ll not deny neither but what some of my people was shook—maybe all was shook; maybe I was shook myself.”
-Long John Silver in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island
💡 BIG PICTURE
Feeling shook, or at least saying “I’m shook”, seems to be on the wane. Is it because there are too many truly shocking events happening? Or simply because we’ve moved on? Or will it morph into another form yet again? Perhaps it already has.
The GenZ face slap, where the palm is dramatically smacked against the forehead in shock and awe, that you see on TikTok communicates some of the same mix of emotions but with a bit more hyperbole and a bit less irony.
And the release of the shook emoji will put the expression in easy reach but is likely to change the meaning yet again.
🤔 LEARN MORE
Read about the history of the word in The Atlantic
Learn more about the rise of shooketh in Know Your Meme
Watch Bruno Mars’ Finesse remix with Cardi B
Go back in time with some turn-of-the-century adventure novels like Treasure Island
∑ ( ᕬ __ ᕬ )
That’s all the feels for this week!
xoxo
Pamela 💗