i love love love hearts
little things make me happy
rich foaming lattes
senryu & photo by M. LaFreniere
heart latte by the barista at Savaya Coffee, 5350 E Broadway Blvd, Tucson, AZ
I like to say “love, love” when I love something a lot. When I saw the five hearts 
on Instagram emoticons, I thought that’s great. It’s perfect for love, love and so cute.
Nope. Turns out the five hearts is revolving hearts ? and means “totally in love”. So people probably got the wrong impression. I loved the latte or the art, not them. So stupid. Gah.
I’ve never been good at languages. I lived in Japan for 3.5 years and I could ask where is the bathroom but I still dragged the server outside to point at the plastic food because I was too afraid of what I might end up ordering.
Don’t laugh. They have one dish with live eels that dive into the tofu and they get cooked in the tofu. Some restaurants also serve up live fish on occasion. Sake means the alcohol drink but it also means salmon. I used to say “kekkon desu” when people offered me more food to tell them I was full. Turned out saying you’re full is “kekko desu”. What is “kekkon desu”? It means “I’m married”. I did that for more than a year before a stranger told me what I was saying because he was puzzled as to why I was telling him I was married. My friends were too nice to correct me. Shakes my head.
So you see, I’m not good at languages. And emoticons are a gray area between symbols and language. I’ve been using the emoticon dictionary to figure out comments people are leaving me on Instagram. These are a few:
| Way to stand out above the rest ?? ??? ? ???? Nice ?? |
? ❤️? ?❤️?❤️ ?? ??? |
☕? ??? ☕? ??? Honestly sounds kinda cool ?? |
You can see there are a lot of ways of saying “I love it” and “good job”. There are single hearts, double hearts, sparkly hearts, purple hearts and much more. You can see no one uses the twirly hearts though. And don’t get me started on smiley faces — they could populate a whole city.
You can’t really trust the emoticon dictionary either as it’s polite. Apparently certain symbols alone or combined are sexual. An eggplant ? can be an ? or it can be a certain part of a male’s anatomy that we won’t mention on a pg site. And don’t combine the eggplant with the peace sign ✌️ because the peace sign can be a part of the women’s anatomy that starts with a V. And be careful of this one ? . It’s not a hospital — it’s a love hotel. People use that one to say they want to hook up right now. Who knew there was a love hotel emoji? I didn’t. It must have come from Japan where love hotels are ubiquitous.
So emojis worry me. Throw a few into the Urban Dictionary; it’s a real eye opener. Like those innocent looking ? sweat or rain drops? uh. They can mean a whole other thing.
I text my congrats with words mostly because I’m deathly afraid that I may inadvertently say something else if I use emoticons. The texting of actually words though betrays me as a newbie.
So I’ve been having to learn a new language every time someone compliments my photo.
I want to say I lattes especially lattes with hearts. I still love that emoticon. It looks like how I used to draw flowers when I was a kid.
Screw it. I’m still going to use it. I mean they can’t think I’m in love with them, can they? Can they?
The All-Time Sexiest Emojis—and What They Really Mean
by Julia Naftulin, Health.com
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