"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 10/08/17 (emojis)

Well, I'm going to talk about something that I don't think I've ever known you to use, but that I know Rachel uses a lot. And that's emojis. I don't think I've ever seen an emoji in a messege... Well, love them or hate them, they look to be around to stay and they are the fastest-moving language in the world at the moment. So back in 2015, Oxford University Press - whose dictionary we use, obviously - sreated a bit of social media storm when they made an emoji their word of the year. It was the face crying with laughter. Some people love it, some people hate it. But it is a valid language - if you want to look at it in terms of a pictorial language, you could take it all the way back to hieroglyphs, etc, so you could see it as a natural extension of something that we have been doing since antiquity. But they're pictograms, anyway, used in electronic communications. Digitals icons, if you like, used to express an emotion or an idea. The ethymology is quite simple, but may possibly surprise some of us, because most of us would know it's a borrowing from Japanese. It sounds Japanese, but the origin has nothing to do with emotion, as the emo might suggest. In fact, it's compaund of E, which in Japanese means a picture, and moji, which simply means a letter or a character. In other words, an emoji is a word or words created by picture. And sounds possibly nicer than pictograph, which means pretty much exactly the same thing. And so the similarity to emoticon, which is whet we convey an emotion through keyboard charecters, rather than actual images, in entirely coincidental. That one is emotion and icon, so that's a simple method of blending. But it can cross language barriers, obviously, which is probably it is groeing at the pace that it is. So I think you need to embrace them, Nick, because they're the sign of the future.