Take your middle fingers and bend each down at the bottom knuckle at a steep angle. Then take your index fingers and arch them down to touch. The rest of your hands curl out of sight.
How people make hearts, and the mediums they are shared through, have shifted as new technologies have emerged. In the late 1800s, operators of the first electrical telegraphs used Morse code to send each other love messages by tapping out the word “heart.” “It’s hard to say ‘I love you’ without it feeling cringe,” said Quinn Sullivan, 21, a college student and TikTok creator from College Station, Texas. “We’re always looking for a new way.”In AOL chat rooms in the 1990s, text ruled. So people found ways to make hearts through the keys available on their keyboards.
Teenagers had to be in the know to successfully clip and save those hearts, and new ones were constantly being created, Higgins said. “People would copy and iterate on versions of the hearts by putting them in their AOL away messages or profiles,” he said.As mobile phones became popular earlier this century, emoji – small images that could appear alongside text – were born. Among the first to be drawn was a red heart, created in 1999 by a Japanese artist, Shigetaka Kurita.
Over the video’s next 21 seconds, Carolan demonstrated that if someone formed a heart with all the fingers on both hands, it meant that person was “a millennial … an adult.” Only Gen Z, she said, makes hearts using just the middle and index fingers, as if it were a secret code.