A Linguistic Look at the Emojis from the 'Adolescence' Series

I see with horror that in the list of recently used emojis on my mobile is a pink heart. I don't remember why I used it. I just hope that the recipient does not interpret it as a sign of romantic interest, as Adam, the son of the policeman investigating a murder, explains in the second episode of Adolescence, the popular miniseries by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham.

In it, a teenager, influenced by the misogynistic discourse of the machosphere (also called the ‘manosphere’), is arrested for the murder of a classmate. Like the pink heart, Adam uncovers the hidden - and even unthinkable - meaning of other emojis, all related to incel (involuntary celibate) and misogynistic digital culture.

A man sits opposite a teenager looking at his mobile phone in an empty classroom.

The teenager Adam has to explain to his father the “code” of emojis so that he understands how teenagers talk. IMDB

For example, the number 100 💯 refers to the theory that 80% of women are attracted to 20% of men and the dynamite 🧨 refers to the possibility of taking action against women. The colours of the hearts also have specific meanings: in addition to pink, red ❤️ indicates love, purple 💜 indicates sexual desire, and yellow 💛 means ‘I'm interested, aren't you’.

Many viewers were dumbfounded by these revelations, which have been branded as tangible evidence of the generation gap, even as warning signs of the hate speech spread on social media. As a linguist and expert in the use of emojis, I would like to introduce some concepts that can help us understand their use in these contexts.

What we say and what we mean

The first aspect to highlight is the difference between denotation and connotation. The former refers to what we could indicate as ‘literal meaning’. Connotation, on the other hand, is the figurative or even subjective meaning that an element can have, depending on the context.

The word ‘donkey’, for example, can refer to the animal or be used to describe an unintelligent person. The same goes for emojis. Different coloured hearts are just that, different coloured hearts (denotation), but their ‘real meaning’ can vary depending on the context.

In one study we showed that the purple heart 💜 is used as a sign of mobilisation in favour of feminism around 8M. On the other hand, in 2019, in Argentina, the green 💚 and light blue 🩵 hearts were used in networks to show affiliation, respectively, with the positions in favour or against the legalisation of abortion in that country.

n Adolescence, it is explained that the bean emoji 🫘 is used to proclaim oneself a member of the incel collective, perhaps because of its resemblance to another emoji, that of the pill 💊. The red pill, popularised by the film Matrix (1999), symbolises the choice to face a hidden truth which, for involuntary celibates, alludes to the acceptance of ‘the truth’ about the mechanisms of sexual attraction.

Emojis as slang

The second concept that can help us understand some of the uses of emojis is that of slang. One of the definitions of ‘jargon’ in the dictionary of the Real Academia Española is that of ‘special language originally used for cryptic purposes by certain groups [...]’. Jargon delimits the ‘boundaries’ of the group and makes the content unintelligible to outsiders. The same goes for emojis.

Again, the ordinary user interprets 🫘 as pinto beans. Emojipedia itself, a web portal with up-to-date and comprehensive information on emojis, says that the explosion emoji (💥,🧨 at Apple), like the fire emoji 🔥 or the 💯, are ‘commonly used to represent that something is excellent or exciting’.

A standing boy looks down on a seated young woman who holds his gaze.

The adults and teenagers in the series seem to speak two different languages. FilmAffinity

As we have seen, in the series, Adam points out that two of these emojis (🧨 and 💯) have a very different connotation in the machosphere. Far from being a novelty of the digital age, these uses of emojis are reminiscent of criminal slang or secret languages developed among members of a group to purposely exclude the rest of society.

One example is polari, used among homosexuals in England in the 1960s when they were considered criminals. Another is verlan (a change of syllables in the expression à l'envers, ‘in reverse’), a speech that originated in the suburbs of French cities in the middle of the last century.

How to understand a language that does not want to be transparent?

In the wake of the cryptic use of emojis brought to light by the trending series on Netflix, solutions have been proposed to prevent teenagers from becoming radicalised like the film's protagonist: just keep an eye on which emojis they use.

However, social problems do not have simple solutions. TikTok's moderation systems have only had to ban the use of the incel tag for members of that group to opt for other terms, such as sub5. Apple changed the design of the gun emoji in 2016 from a revolver to a water pistol 🔫 to prevent it being used to threaten. As we can see, it has done little good.

Emojis are an example of the enormous creativity we display when it comes to communicating. If anything, Adolescence has made many of us take them more seriously.