Emoji

Below is a sentence familiar to many of us — sort of. It is an emoji version of “Call me Ishmael”, the first line of Moby Dick. The little images might be thought of as an emerging system analogous to hieroglyphics, which also started as a collection of pictures, but it lacks some key features of language, writes Keith Houston in an excerpt from his new book, Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji. With a little help from singer and emoji-virtuoso Cher, Houston argues that emoji are “insurgents within language, a colourful and symbiotic virus whose symptoms we have only haltingly understood”.

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