A couple of years ago, I frequently found myself driving past a roadside ice cream stand under construction. For weeks, the roof of this stand, a gigantic white swirl of fiberglass soft serve, sat on the ground next to the structure, waiting to be lowered onto the finished, cone-shaped building with a crane. I know what it was supposed to represent, but every time I glimpsed it, my instinctive first thought was There’s a giant poop emoji .

Keith Houston’s history of emoji, Face With Tears of Joy , argues that emoji have “become so ubiquitous in our writing, so quotidian, that we should be talking about them in the same breath as grammar or punctuation.” I don’t know about grammar, which seems as fundamental to language, spoken and written, as words themselves. But punctuation? Absol

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