Earlier quoted context omitted.
Idiocracy called this "talking like a fag".
There's a bit in Anathem about the secular society sometimes having their literacy degenerate to such an extent that they stop using alphabetic / phonetic writing systems and revert to pictographic or ideographic systems. Immediately made me think of the hospital scene in Idiocracy... and also the way some people make heavy use of emojis.
On the other hand, Korean ditched the ideographic Hanja (Chinese Character) writing system because it was too difficult to learn, in favour of a much simpler phonetic one. In Japan, the classical Kanji Chinese writing system was considered a prestige language and was customarily not taught to ordinary folks; the modern Hiragana script evolved as an easy-to-learn alternative, (initially) used heavily by women who were often not taught Kanji.
Of course, Chinese characters are not pictographic and haven't been for a few thousand years, but they are still largely ideographic.