Tim Bray writes about Emoji, the Japanese variant on “emoticons”. NTT DoCoMo has set up over 200 characters which can be used to express a word or an idea with a minimum of typing.

I sometimes say that I’m in favor of “active construction” of language — in contrast to people who are sticklers for “official usage” and rail against the introduction of new words and phrases. Sure, some things that creep into common usage are pretty horrible, but ultimately, language is an organic thing — meaning isn’t in the words, its in the people using them, so there’s no point in resisting change.

Of course, as a child of the computer era, I’ve always loved the idea that typography could add a layer of meaning upon the basic words. I’ve been intrigued at efforts to use distinctive quotation marks (Robert Forward’s Flight of the Dragonfly, and something by Piers Anthony) or lettering (Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics) to add some sense of “voice” to the actual words.

So while Bray is unsure about whether “emoji” is a good idea or not, I say “bring it on!”

If you love fonts and characters, you should also have a look at Tim Bray’s earlier piece on Unicode, just to
see some of the remarkable characters he’s dug out of the official specs.