Emojerks.

Recently the New York Times published an article entitled "What Is IJBOL? A Korean word? A new boy band? This new acronym is replacing LOL and ROFL on social media." 

I didn't read the article, because I don't subscribe to the paper and wouldn't give them a nickel if my hair was on fire and they were selling buckets of water for five cents each. 

But to answer the question, IJBOL means I Just Busted Out Laughing (or Burst or some other appropriate B). It makes more sense than the stupid ROTFL, because no one ever saw something so funny online that they literally R on the F. 

The article is just another in a long series by the Times that could be described as "What Are Those Weird Ordinary People Doing Out There?" They love to look at human beings as if they themselves are some strange Olympian race occupying the planet rather than the overeducated trust-fund bizarros that they are. Make sure to check out next Sunday's exposé, "Canned Vegetables: Are They Having a Moment?" 

Translations for Internet initialisms goes back to the earliest days of networks. LOL broke through into the common culture, and from there it was a race to see what silly thing would catch on next but be inscrutable to outsiders -- especially among teens whose parents monitored their electronic communications. Urban Dictionary, a place where you can always check in if you want to lose your faith in humanity and you want to do it fast, has about a million disgusting initialisms that the contributors just make up off the top of their tiny craniums for the lulz.

But, thanks to the smartphone, most of us are content to send emojis to one another, at least once we figure out what each new update of emojis is supposed to mean. I could probably tell you in a general way what each emoji on my phone is supposed to represent, but I wouldn't put money on it. 

It was different when we were young. 

 Ah, the days of real sport!

Emojis and communication.

Everyone's all crazy about emojis.

Either people hate the things and believe that their use is another sign of the apocalypse, or they love them and find them a useful, quick way to communicate that transcends language. Evidence of this split in opinion can be seen by the universally panned Emoji Movie last year, which took home four Golden Raspberries and still grossed $217.8 million on a $50 million budget. Or take the case of the giant fight at the Unicode Consortium over making a poop emoji that frowns. Emotions (and emoticons) are running high on our little emotive friends.

Although I had some stern words for emoji pants a couple of years ago, I confess that for texting they're a fun and quick way to communicate. Any married man can find out quickly by text that he's in the doghouse:

ME: 😀
WIFE: 😡
ME: 😰

(In these examples I'm using the emojis Google provides for Blogger, but they're similar to the ones on my iPhone.)

In a way, emojis have provided what Esperanto had always promised, an international means of communication. Yet even with emojis, cultural things can be baffling. What are these?

⛉🎴⛛⛕🏣⛿

The red card is a playing card, but not a common look for the US. The building is a Japanese post office. But I only knew what they were because I read the descriptions... in English.

Some emojis are up to no good, too. The difference between a hotel and a "love hotel" (hot-sheet palace, hourly rental, no-tell motel, etc.) can be seen here:

🏨 🏩 

While that might get the message across to your Tinder buddy, emojis are not great at more subtle communication -- although many find subtlety between faces like 😲and 😳, 😸 and 😹, or 😃 and 😄.

But can they really communicate more poetic thought? Try this:

👦🏃⛅
☁👆🌄
😲
🜚🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻
🌊🌲🌳
🍃💃🌬

Of course that translates to:

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

By Wordsworth, as any college freshman could tell you back when college students studied dead white guy writers. 💀👱✏📕

It's fine to emjoicize it, but there's no poetry there. I had to use sunflowers for daffodils because there's no daffodil emoji. Really, it's quite limiting. When it comes to emojis, a picture is worth maybe one word, or even half of one.

Ultimately, I think emojis have their place, although perhaps not on the movie screen.

Will emojis ever go away? Probably not, as long as texting remains the dominant method of telecommunications in our culture. They're too useful as shorthand. Their popularity in other media, however, may have reached a high-water mark already.

Which, for people who love them, would be 😢.

Worse pants.

Last December I wrote about the fantastic lounge pants I got for Christmas, the Bat Pants!

They kicked the crap out of my Superman pants.

As I mentioned at the time, my wife, who gave me the Bat Trousers, refused to let me wear them outside unless it was pitch-black. Which is appropriate for Batman, I guess. But she didn't see them as appropriate, she saw them as embarrassing.

And yet she bought them for me. What does that say?

Well, having a look around at men's clothing on Amazon, I found a far, far worse pair:

Yes, emoji pants! And yes, they were in the men's department!

Those are some bad pants.

My first thought was that these couldn't be intended for men, but indeed they are. My second was to wonder if the well-known poop emoji was featured on the butt side.

Apparently it isn't. But for those obsessed with the little poop guy, there's always the leggings:

The culture degenerates in three sections:

1) Some guy has an idea for a product that degenerates the culture (say, Batman pants for adult men);

2) People like the product but have too much respectability to use it in public;

3) Some other guy, wanting attention, comes out with product #2 (emoji pants), which is much worse than product #1;

4) People see product #2 and think that product #1 was practically a tuxedo by comparison, and start using it in public;

5) A third guy now wants attention and comes out with product #3 (emoji poop pants)....

And the next thing you know we have cursing on basic cable, schools that are run only to protect union members, companies fleeing the nation, colleges terrorized by screaming campus garbage babies, rampant opiate abuse, horrible idiots and felons as presidential candidates. federal courts that emoji on the Constitution, and a Mad Max movie winning the most Oscars. Where does it all end?