You'll probably never guess what Minnesota's favorite emoji is

Can you guess what Minnesota's favorite emoji is? Perhaps more important, can you possibly muster the ability to care?

I am not a frequent user of silly, little yellow faces. It just seems as if we should be past hieroglyphics at this point in human civilization, not reverting to it. I don't even like "lol," since A) absolutely no one who writes it is, in fact, laughing out loud, and B) people append it to everything, no matter how inappropriate.

"I'm sitting here in the snowbank with the car buried up to the doors and I have 2 keep the motor running so I don't freeze, but the carbon monoxide is probably backing up into the interior of the car. lol"

The most I'll do is ;), which betrays my age. It's an emoticon, a relic of ancient internet times before cartoony jaundiced faces. It's a wink and a smile, intended to express cheerful sarcasm. It comes in handy when you say something that could be misinterpreted. Oh, I could do the new version — /s — but that lacks humor and seems a bit bitter. Examples:

"Oh, sure, I'd absolutely love to come over and help you move the mattresses to the curb ;)" That says "of course no one truly, deeply desires to wrestle a sofa down the stairs; it's like manhandling a comatose hippo. But I'll do it."

"Oh sure I'd love to help you move the mattresses to the curb /s" That's brutally honest.

The ubiquitous yellow faces have become legion, and they can handle all sorts of situations. There's the laughing face, of course. There's "laughing while crying." This indicates that you are so overcome by heedless mirth that you are weeping — something that happens to you a half-dozen times in your life, maybe, but according to its usage in text messages, people string six laughing-while-crying emojis together to indicate a fit of such duration they are dehydrated by the time they regain composure.

At least that's what it means today. In a year it could mean something else entirely, such as "I have both despair and intestinal gas." Or maybe something counterintuitive like empathy.

Meanings change, and you have to take care. The other day on the radio I heard a 30-something internet writer describe her horror at using an emoji incorrectly. It was the one that had pursed lips, as if blowing a kiss. Turns out the younger kids had repurposed it for something else: getting what you deserve, reaping the consequences.

The writer discussed the perils of mutating emojis, as if they were strains of COVID, but didn't say what was truly bothersome about the event: Using an emoji wrong must have made her feel old. Like, Grandma old. One moment she's slinging emojis with utter confidence, the next she's got her gray hair in a bun, knitting in a rocking chair, waiting for Jack Benny to come on the wireless.

That said, the average person who doesn't litter their texts with these jaundiced noggins can figure out what they probably mean. Except, that is, for the one that Minnesotans use the most.

The Green Square.

Yes. According to a worldwide emoji usage study conducted by the website crossword-solver.io, the green square is our most popular emoji. I asked around, and no one knows what it means, and no one uses it. The "Emojipedia" — and how I wish that was pronounced "eee-mo jippa-de-ah" — says, "May be used to represent anything green." OK. But there's more!

"May 2021: Sometimes shown in Twitter names in support of Taproot, a Bitcoin fork (potential feature change) that would allow additional privacy measures for transactions."

Somehow I don't think that's our motivation.

Perhaps it's a yearning for summer, followed by a celebration of it. But we don't think of ourselves as a green state. We're white for snow, blue for water, then green for the 72 hours or so we call summer.

Wisconsin, by the way, also has the green square as its most popular emoji, which is ridiculous. I mean, there's a yellow wedge of cheese emoji, and they go with the green square?

Perhaps that's because they saw Minnesota do it, and they want to be cool like us. Cool, and mysterious. But they don't know what it means, and we don't know what it means. Imagine if you had a Minnesotan and a Wisconsinite sitting in neutral territory — say, floating down the St. Croix — and the Wisconsin guy wants to make an impression.

"So, great summer, huh? Total green square emoji if you ask me."

Minnesotan, confused: "Yeah, totally."

Wisconsinite, emboldened: "I was just saying the other day this was one summer you could say was, like, Chlorophyll Cubed."

Minnesotan, confused, just nods. "I guess it is. You could say it was a four-sided lime."

We may never know why this is the most-used emoji among Minnesotans. Come to think of it, we should use laughing-while-crying emoji, because that's what your face looks like when it's 10 below and the wind kicks up. If they come up with an emoji that's grimacing while ice cubes fall out of its winked eye, we'll be first in line.