For a deep dive into the world of emoji, check out Keith Houston’s new book, Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of the Emoji (Bookshop|Amazon). Emoji offer what’s called paralinguistic restitution, that is, restoring to written language...
The word emoji doesn’t come from the English words emotion or emoticon. Instead, it is a combination of the Japanese words e for “picture” and moji “written character,” so the blend emoji literally means “pictogram.” In Japanese, the word emoji can...
A college student in Bowling Green, Kentucky, wonders about the origin of the word emoji. Although you might guess that the name for these little pictures inserted into text messages contains the English word emotion, that’s just a coincidence...
We all know that gesture people do, sometimes ironically, where you wipe or smack your hands together to signify that a job’s done. There’s no common term for it, but a Schenectady, New York, listener has a great suggestion: all-done clappy hands...
Some new slang is making the rounds. Hamburger menus are those little stacks of short horizontal lines in the top left corner of websites that function as menus. Webrooming is the act of scoping out goods online only to buy them the store–the...
Emphasizing one word over another, especially in written correspondence, makes a huge difference in the meaning of a sentence. And if all caps or italics don’t do the trick in an email, consider using an emoticon. This is part of a complete episode...