Type faces

MANILA, Philippines - With emojis as the new vocabulary, does anyone still text with words these days? From face palms to eye rolls, here’s a list of emojis we’re dying to have on our phones.

Maybe we’re just getting really lazy. Or perhaps, we’re actually getting really creative. But in any case, I actually don’t mind having these less conventional conversations. Thankfully, the good old emoticons got a digital makeover (thank you, Steve Jobs!) and gave us the emojis. It’s visually playful and is easily available on your keyboard for your disposal (and that, we did a lot of). More than just emotional punctuations and visual treats, a string of emojis can replace sentences without requiring more than a few taps or going beyond the 140-character limit. But unlike memes and GIFs, we can’t easily generate them on our own. And if you’re anything like us, a thought is never really complete without at least one of these playful little suckers. So here’s a list of emojis that Young STAR would like to ask Apple to deliver for Christmas.

1 Face Palm

The Internet lurks with trolls and click-baits ready to be our next quoted retweet. The hook of the posts themselves urge us to immediately share, but in, like, a really bad way. While we can never tell if it was intentionally papansin or just plain stupid, getting mad over it is as much a waste of time as reading it. One thing is for sure, though: having a face palm emoji fills the ongoing void of a middle finger emoji while adding a little more than rage to the conversation. It’s also not adding any insight about the issue but in a place where Bieber’s d*ck pic and Philippine politics are deemed equally newsworthy on the trending list, there’s only one appropriate response: *face palm* God bless the Internet.

2 Eye Roll

Nothing says maldita like the signature eye roll. Whether trying to tell someone that something is annoying or just plain boring, this emoji will do the trick. It screams pathetic and is perfected by the likes of mean girls, privileged kids, and Rihanna. (Remember her face in that BBHMM video?) It’s the perfect punctuation to any sassy statement even if there isn’t any statement said aloud in the first place. They say the eyes are the gateways to the soul. But being given the “roll of death” is not something that we look forward to.

3 Salute

No one wants to sound like a generated auto-reply. When it comes to replying to work messages, it’s hard to strike the balance between sounding formal and showing a little bit of personality. But if Siri has updated things to be a little bit more cheeky then so can we. With a gesture of respect coupled with a cute caricature, a little salute emoji wouldn’t hurt anybody. Although it’s best to only use it in conversations with people that you have an intimate, or at least an almost personal, relationship, with. Your chummy-chummy of a boss asked you to revise the project proposal for the nth time? Mom asked you to bring the dogs to the groomer? Say yes with a salute. After all, what’s the thing about “noted with thanks” anyway?

4 Whatever

Often to be used when clueless (typically when trying to make dinner plans with friends), this emoji is as indecisive as the person using it. It could mean “whatever” like “who cares anyway?” Or it could mean IDK (I don’t know) like “I seriously have no idea.” It could even go as far as YOLO (you only live once): taking the empowering or the typical reckless route. But in any case, it’s best to have an emoji as ambiguous as this. Because God forbid that we pretend to be smarter than we really are.

5 Kilig

Let’s admit it. No amount of !!!!!! and <3 <3 <3 can express our fan feels when it comes to our favorite teleserye love team. But by combining the heart eyes and the overflowing tears, this “kilig” emoji perfectly conveys the irony of love: the fantasy and the heartbreak of it all. From the original pairings of Rico and Claudine and Marvin and Jolina to today’s AlDub and JaDine, such emotional manipulation is so complicated there isn’t even an English translation for the term “kilig.” But by having this emoji, #OTWOL tweets will never be the same again.

Art by Tim Lopez