'Face With Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji' by Keith Houston

"Emoji blew up right around 2011," said in Slate , and we're lucky they did. So many more of our online text interactions would have led to misunderstandings and arguments without the hearts, smiley faces, and scores of other pictographs we can now call up instantly on our phones. Keith Houston's "breezy, witty" new "natural history" of emoji doesn't oversell their significance. He pushes back against the claim that emoji comprise a language all their own, preferring to call them "insurgents within language." But "his assertion that these little images have become an inextricable part of our culture feels credible," and he makes the most of the subject's entertainment value. In fact, "one of the primary pleasures of

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