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I will admit that I still don’t speak Emoji particularly fluently. In fact, I used to hate them.
They’re growing on me. ❤️
A friend recently asked how much, if at all, I value the emojis people leave in response to things I write. It made me wonder whether a tiny red heart can sometimes be more sincere than three perfectly good English words.
Bear with me.
I am very much from the “How are you?” generation. Before emojis, before GIFs, before TikTok, before a small yellow face became capable of expressing every human emotion, we had words. And I use those three all the time. I always have. At the start of a phone call, at the top of a WhatsApp message, when I meet somebody, when I haven’t spoken to someone for months.
“Hi. How are you?”
But how often am I actually asking a question?
Not very often, it turns out.
The research says I’m not asking
With time on my hands I went looking, and found a 2018 study by Mengyi Chen examining 201 naturally occurring “How are you?” exchanges in Britain and America. Most people gave exactly what you’d expect. Fine. Good. Alright. Not bad.
Here is the wonderful bit.
Out of 201 exchanges, only one person actually answered the question. ☝️
One.
(He’d had his heating fixed and wanted to talk about it. You can hear the panic in the other speaker’s reply.)
The phrase is so embedded in English that we’ve stopped hearing the words inside it. Even “howdy” 🤠 is just “how do ye” worn smooth by four hundred years of people saying it too fast to care.
So very often, “How are you?” simply means:
“Hello.” 👋
Which brings me back to emojis.
What the heart actually says
❤️ 🙏 👍 😂
I used to think words could manage perfectly well on their own, thank you very much. I am still working out what people mean by particular yellow faces. And GIFs remain largely beyond me. Moving pictures that apparently constitute an entire conversation. I know what they are. Sort of. 😂
But writing openly about living with PSP has changed my view of them completely.
Sometimes somebody reads something difficult I’ve written and sends me one thing:
❤️
Nothing else.
And I understand it exactly:
I read it. I care. I’m thinking about you. I haven’t got a clue what to say.
That’s quite a lot for one small red heart to carry.
And here, I think, is why it works. The heart never pretended to be a question. It makes no promise it can’t keep. It doesn’t ask for anything, doesn’t require me to summarise a progressive neurological disease before breakfast, and doesn’t leave either of us stranded.
“How are you?” is shaped like a question and mostly isn’t one. ❤️ doesn’t ask anything at all. It simply says something.
The people who find another hook
Plenty of people don’t ask me “How are you?” at all.
Some don’t know what to ask. Some are nervous about the answer. Some don’t want to intrude. And some already know, because I blog about my life most days. Asking how I am when you’ve just read 1,500 words explaining precisely how I am is arguably a little inefficient. 😂
So they find other hooks.
“How did you sleep?”
“How are your eyes?”
“How did the physio go?”
Or they talk to me about something else entirely, which is often the kindest option available.
I value every one of those.
And then there are the brave ones:
“How are you… really?” 😬
Now that is a question. Three dots and one extra word change everything. It says: I know the background. I know there may not be a simple answer. I’m asking anyway.
I value that enormously.
And the ones who don’t know
There are still a few people who have no idea about the PSP. They ask innocently:
“How are you?”
“I’m fine, thank you.”
Then, somewhere later in the conversation, they discover that the man who just told them he was fine has a progressive neurological disease, uses a wheelchair and has a full-time carer.
That requires a certain amount of recalibration. 😳
But here’s the strange part. I wasn’t lying.
Ask me today how I am and I’ll say:
“I’m fine, thank you. How are you?”
Ask me how I am really, and you’ll get very nearly the same answer.
I’m fine. 👍
The words don’t change. What changes is the question standing behind them, and whether I know you’re prepared to stay for the longer version if there is one.
So
If you don’t know what to ask me, don’t lose sleep hunting for the perfect words. There aren’t any, and I’m not marking you.
Send me a ❤️.
I spent years thinking emojis were a poor substitute for language. It turns out that when words are hardest to find, one small red heart says the true thing while three familiar words say hello.
I’m still learning the language. But that particular word I understand perfectly.
p.s. This is just my view but it is my blog 👍
Mengyi Chen (2018), “Responses to the Greeting ‘How Are You?’ in Britain and America”, Theory and Practice in Language Studies 8(8), 988–995. The study looked specifically at “How are you?” used as a greeting and excluded genuine enquiries after someone’s health, which rather proves the point.
