Largely ignoring the more substantive aspects of the recent Unicode characters update (to 7.0) to smartphones and computers, such as the enhancements to support for Indic languages, and the expansion of Asian, African and Cantonese support, media outlets mostly chose to froth with child-like glee (or occasionally despair) at the added emoticons, in this case those known as emoji. Some have pointed out interesting issues, such as the "whiteness" of the humanoid representations, but mostly it's been "look at that" reports focusing on Vulcan salutes and middle-finger symbols.

Now, that is no doubt all very exciting for texting tweenagers, and I don't want to come across here as a linguistically conservative, humourless and miserable curmudgeon.

Nonetheless, there seem to be two aspects of the response that are noteworthy, and neither in a good way. Firstly, emoticons seem the least interesting, funny and inventive of linguistic joys that the internet has brought us. Really. Internet memes, with their set-up of repetition, brevity and a shared contextual frame seems to place them somewhere between haiku and standup punchline. Others begin as humour, as a mild diversion, like lolcat speech patterns, descending into a kind of obsessive, and astounding madness, like the lolcat Bible translation project (I can see why you'd bother with Ecclesiastes 1, but all the Bible? even, say, Numbers 27?).

Emoticons seem pedestrian and unimaginative next to this level of innovation.

It's not an objection to brevity or humour, and no sensible person really sees a new range of possible emoji as a sign of the eschaton. It's that they aren't much use.

The brutal empty-frame of SMS can lead to misreading where irony is concerned, true, but a little symbol at the end seems like rather thin soup in a world where we have so much language at our disposal. If I can't indicate that my praise of a colleague's new shirt is sarcastic, not literal, without a gurning yellow winker, its presence stands more as indicative of my linguistic incompetence than his sartorial faux pas.

Secondly, the context and use of emoticons seems to typify a cultural trend that is at the very least rather annoying: a refusal of adults to act like grown-ups, and a mindless desire to endlessly, and uncritically, adopt all that is youth-related, and to never out-grow the preoccupation we have stolen from teenagers – that with being "cool".

I am not cool. I am middle-aged. I can wear whatever is fashionable, pepper my texts with emoji, listen to the latest music – but none of these prevents me from being part of the generation that now bears responsibility for the world, its state and important decisions. I have adult choices to make, that matter: because I am the grown-up, and it's my fault. We might argue that the over-adoption of childish net-neologisms, a desperation to conspire in our own infantilisation, is like an act of Sartrean bad-faith, a refusal to view ourselves as the people who bear responsibility for shaping the world and its future. But it is still true. No amount of winking smileys can make up for, say, a refusal to fight injustice, or face up to climate change. "Screwed the planet. Soz, lol ☹"