

Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly: Did he mean to give the CMO the brush-off? Photograph: Julien Behal (People in the United States are thought to send around 96 each a day).īut, as with Gifs, if you are going to let an emoji – any emoji – do the grunt work for you in a conversation, you’d really better know what you’re getting yourself into. Now that we are all social distancing and staring into our phones, tone of voice and body language have been swept aside, for the ease of the emoji.Īccording to a study by Swyft media, more than six billion emojis are sent around the world every day. We are living in strange and different and, yes, unprecedented times. (Were they trying to say, “Yes, you’re still talking, but we’re not really listening?” I suppose you’d have to ask them.) After Donnelly tweeted yesterday about Ireland’s progress on the vaccine front, thousands of people simply replied with a single thumbs-up emoji. In fact – look, people are bored – a meme appears to have been born. When the exchange was reported over the weekend, in the Sunday Independent, Donnelly’s wayward emoji use didn’t go unnoticed. Whatever his inner thoughts or motives, news of the exchange is doing nothing to dispel the niggling sense some have that Donnelly’s personal brand runs towards the smug and the snarky. If you are going to let an emoji – any emoji – do the grunt work for you in a conversation, you’d really better know what you’re getting yourself into
THUMBS UP GIF FOR OUTLOOK PROFESSIONAL
Did Donnelly really mean to give the CMO the brush-off? Is he a simply a busy man for whom brevity is key? Did he realise in the moment that this was an inappropriate response to a professional correspondence? Or is he just hopelessly out of touch with the nebulous contexts of each emoji?

Let’s pause this scene for a moment, and step outside it, Matrix-style. Katherine Ryan: ‘I definitely felt shame as a single mother, the way people word things’.What is wokefishing, the latest online dating deception?.The Crown’s Charles and Diana years: A world of privilege, glamour and tension.(Donnelly had said on radio that transmission was slowing in Dublin and that the outlook appeared “positive”). On October 12th the Chief Medical Officer, Dr Tony Holohan, texted Donnelly to say that the number of Covid-19 cases in Dublin was on the rise and to advise him to be cautious in public messages about the virus in the capital. Do what you want here.”įar be it from me to put words into the mouth, or even thumbs, of Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly, but it turns out that this is one of his emojis du choix. What you are basically saying to the thumbs-up emoji’s recipient is: “This conversation is over for me. It’s telling the other person to “bugger off” while still hoping to seem polite (which incidentally, you don’t). It’s a way to shut down a conversation without explicitly silencing them. It’s a close cousin of the middle-finger emoji, for people not brave enough to use the middle-finger emoji. What you are basically saying to the thumbs-up emoji’s recipient is: ‘This conversation is over for me. It’s a dismissive kiss-off, meted out with a single flick of the finger. The “thumbs up” emoji may look like harmless enough, but rest assured it is the most passive-aggressive of all the emojis at your disposal. There are some emojis that, in a business conversation at least, should never see the light of day.Īmong them the aubergine emoji (obvs), the turd emoji (because you are not five) and the love-hearts-for-eyes emoji (or, at least, under a very, very specific and limited set of circumstances).
