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Consider the tilde. There it is, that little squiggle, hanging out on the far-upper-left-hand side of your computer keyboard. The symbol dates back to ancient Greece, though tilde comes from Spanish, and in modern English it's used to indicate "approximately" (e.g., ~30 years) or "equivalence" (x ~ y) in mathematics. And, as of this year, according to a breakdown of the website emojitracker by Luminoso, a text-analytics company, the tilde was surpassed in usage on Twitter by the emoji symbol for "joy." Which looks like this: .
The Joy emoji--also referred to on the Emojipedia website as "Face With Tears of Joy" or "the LOL Emoji" (emoji don't have official names, just nicknames created by their users)--dates back, in North America, to roughly 2011, when Apple put a readily accessible emoji keyboard in iOS 5 for the iPhone. Which means that in three short years, Face With Tears of Joy vanquished the 3,000-year-old tilde.
And that's just one emoji. If we count all emoji together--Smiling Face and Smiling Face With Smiling Eyes and Grinning Face and Winking Face and Smiling Face With Heart-Shaped Eyes and Kissing Face and Kissing Face With Closed Eyes and Face With Stuck-Out Tongue With Tightly Closed Eyes , not to mention House With Garden and Convenience Store and Tram and Love Hotel and Ghost and Money With Wings and Chart With Upward Trend and Hamburger --then emoji, as a group, are now used more frequently on Twitter than are hyphens or the numeral 5.
All of which is to say: The 3,000-year-old tilde might want to consider rebranding itself as Invisible Man With Twirled Mustache.
t's easy to dismiss emoji. They are, at first glance, ridiculous. They are a small invasive cartoon army of faces and vehicles and flags and food and symbols trying to topple the millennia-long reign of words. Emoji are intended to illustrate, or in some cases replace altogether, the words we send each other digitally, whether in a text message, email, or tweet. Taken together, emoji look like the electronic equivalent of those puffy stickers tweens used to ornament their Trapper Keepers.
And yet, if you have a smartphone, emoji are now available to you as an optional written language, just like any global language,...