No emoji better suited 2022's ups and downs than the saluting face, used by laid-off Twitter employees and many others to express irony, reassurance, and more
Miles Klee / Rolling Stone : Tweets: @rubeseatsinfo Tweets: @rubeseatsinfo : Oh my god this entire time I thought this emoji was someone creepily peering around a corner and the hand was a little arm https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The saluting face's rise caps a decade-long arc of emoji institutionalization: Oxford Dictionaries made 😂 its 2015 Word of the Year, Apple confirmed it as America's most-used emoji two years later, and by 2019 the Wall Street Journal was describing emoji as standard equipment for workplace cohesion rather than a frivolity.
Miles Klee's Rolling Stone piece lands three months after Adobe's survey of 5,000 US emoji users found 91% think emoji eases communication and 68% welcome it at work — but the emoji of the moment is no longer the tears-of-joy consensus pick. It is a gesture of ironic resignation, popularized by laid-off Twitter employees signing off during the platform's mass layoffs.
First-order effects
- Laid-off Twitter employees turned the saluting face into a shared sign-off, giving a single glyph a recognizable meaning — wry reassurance in the face of job loss — that spread well beyond the company.
- Rolling Stone's year-end canonization continues the pattern set by Oxford Dictionaries in 2015, where media institutions rather than standards bodies decide which emoji defined a year.
Second-order effects
- Employers who adopted emoji for esprit de corps per the Wall Street Journal's 2019 reporting now face an emoji whose dominant reading is ironic defeat, raising the stakes of tone misreads in workplace messaging.
- Rival platforms and publishers get a ready-made cultural shorthand for their own workforce reductions, since the gesture travels without needing Twitter as its host.
Third-order effects
- If each year yields a defining emoji tied to the economic mood — tears of joy in 2015, the salute in 2022 — the emoji lexicon functions as a running index of workplace sentiment, tracked by newsrooms more than by any standards process.
- Emoji meaning is increasingly set by viral usage events rather than top-down design, which pressures platforms and style guides to treat emoji interpretation as a living, contested vocabulary.
The trend: Emoji are shifting from decorative novelty to a barometer of workplace and economic mood, with each year's defining glyph marking the cultural moment it spread through.