This string of emoji is such an interesting language experiment.
We all know what it means, kind of. We know it's somewhere between shy and embarrassed and insecure and upset. It's some superposition of those words. And this is exactly my point: it's difficult to describe in normal English phrases exactly what this string of emoji means, but we all inherently understand it looking at it. There's no reason this should be the case. The face makes sense, but why do the fingers touching compliment that facial expression so well? Nobody makes this gesture in real life. You would just look like an idiot. Why is it so understandable in emoji form?
The truth is, it doesn't really matter why. We all see this sign and feel an emotion without needing to enter that intermediary step of defining words. The meaning is held within the language itself, not our definitional understanding of what the words (or in this case, emoji) mean.
Thinking of language in this way — as a definition-less medium that conveys meaning through the sounds and shapes of the words rather than their actual meanings — has always been extremely intriguing to me. It's powerful to write a string of words that means sad things, but it's even more powerful to write a string of words that conjures sadness even without the words themselves having sad meanings. "Champagne Supernova" by Oasis is a phenomenal example: the lyrics themselves mean absolutely nothing of substance, but when read together, the winding rhymes feel weightless and aspirational even without any words pointing to that conclusion directly. It's a whole new dimension of writing that's difficult to use effectively but can have astounding impact when done well.
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