You’ll find an emoji keyboard on your iPhone, nestled right between Dutch and Estonian. Taken together, emoji look like the electronic equivalent of those puffy stickers tweens used to ornament their Trapper Keepers.Īnd yet, if you have a smartphone, emoji are now available to you as an optional written language, just like any global language, such as Arabic and Catalan and Cherokee and Tamil and Tibetan and English. 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. 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. 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.Īll of which is to say: The 3,000-year-old tilde might want to consider rebranding itself as Invisible Man With Twirled Mustache. Which means that in three short years, Face With Tears of Joy vanquished the 3,000-year-old tilde.Īnd that’s just one emoji. 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. 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 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.

There it is, that little squiggle, hanging out on the far-upper-left-hand side of your computer keyboard. 📝 Now approved: 117 new emojis for 2020 #Emoji2020 the tilde. Plus, considering we’re only a month into an already crappy year, we’ve got a feeling that ‘Smiling Face With Tear‘ will be everyone’s new go-to. Other emojis that will see the light of day on your phones include a transgender flag, bubble tea, and the pinched finger gesture, otherwise known as the ‘Italian Hand Gesture’.īut in all honesty, we only need one. Hell, they should just call this emoji ‘The Youth’. Short and sweet. It’s the face you make whenever you claim that you’re totally okay, even if you’re lowkey heartbroken, facing an existential crisis, and losing faith in humanity as Duterte spouts another nonsensical flex – all at the same time. Called ‘Smiling Face with Tear’, UC’s newest is one of its approved 117 symbols for this year. Between the coronavirus outbreak, the daily demands of adulting, and all the other crap 2020 has thrown at us so far, it’s getting harder to keep all of our sh*ts together.Īnd as if on cue, Unicode Consortium (UC) has dropped an all-too-real emoji that perfectly fits everyone’s current mood.

Smile emoji