I stumbled on Hurlingham's bookshop by Putney Bridge underground station while visiting London. What a treat! Stop by if you get the chance.

Were you ever put through a slide show of someone’s holiday snaps? Well, I visited Egypt in February and have been telling anyone who will listen how fascinating a trip it was. Lacking a Kodak slide projector, I’ve written a few words about our experiences: staging.shadycharact...

It's nice! Although it does lose the paragraph indents which make it easier for the eye to find its way around dense pages of text.

Hi Adriel - interesting! I've pilcrows used as separators before, but never explicitly as paragraph terminators.

The Em Dash - 99% Invisible Last summer, Bryan Vance found himself in an argument with a stranger on Reddit. Vance, a Portland-based journalist who runs Stumptown Savings, a newsletter covering local grocery deals, had been accused of using ChatGPT to write his content. The evidence? His use of em dashes. “A Reddit user accused me of using AI, pointing to

On @99pi.org again! This time round I spoke to Will Aspinall about the storied em dash (‘—′, that is, rather than ‘–′ or ‘-′, but you knew that). Listen at 99percentinvisible.o..., or read my own earlier piece on AI and the em dash at shadycharacters.co.u....

I lived in that area about 12-13 years ago, and connectivity was terrible. Glad to hear it has improved!

Day 10, and it's the final day of the 2025 Shady Characters advent calendar. Thank you for sticking with me! And on the subject of gratitude, here's my final post for the year, on PERSON WITH FOLDED HANDS (🙏): shadycharacters.co.u....

Check out shadycharacters.co.u... for all previous entries!

Day 9! Home stretch, and you would be forgiven for being a little tired of the Christmas rush by now. A good time, then, to examine FACE WITH BAGS UNDER EYES (🫩): shadycharacters.co.u....

Check out shadycharacters.co.u... to see previous entries, including '😂', '👍', '✨' and '🕴️'!

Day 6 of the Shady Characters advent calendar! Time is flying. Today's entry looks at RAINBOW FLAG (🏳️‍🌈) - an emoji so potent it once left crashed iPhones in its wake: shadycharacters.co.u...

Check out shadycharacters.co.u... to see previous entries, including '😂', '♨️', '🍔', '👍' and ''✨!

It's day 5 of the ✨Shady Characters✨ advent calendar! And what better way to mark the occasion than to take a look at the SPARKLES emoji's controversial new job? Read more at shadycharacters.co.u....

Check out shadycharacters.co.u... to see previous entries, including '😂', '♨️', '🍔' and '👍'!

Day 3 of the Shady Characters advent calendar! An unassuming emoji today, in the form of the HAMBURGER (🍔), but one which can teach us a surprising amount about how the emoji sausage is made, so to speak: shadycharacters.co.u....

If you missed day 1 or day 2, check out shadycharacters.co.u...!

Ten years ago, the OED’s word of the year was “😂”.

If this is a word, is ‘emoji’ a language?

@keithhouston.bsky.social’s interesting exploration of the question takes us along a literary translation (Emoji Dick), the challenge of universality and more:

buff.ly/D00WGXr

I imagined as much. My commiserations. Birmingham seems to be stuck in a rut it can't get out of.

Is Birmingham still as bad, then? I'm impressed with how Edinburgh has come on, although the very centre of town is still a bit underwhelming.

If you're a cyclist in West Lothian, do yourself a favour and lay your hands on Spokes' excellent cycling map: www.spokes.org.uk/2025/08/spok.... There's a new edition out soon, so the current one is going for a song.

CAE 53's great reads include:
- @royinori.bsky.social on worm hunters in S. Ontario
- @keithhouston.bsky.social on emoji language
- @clearwing3.bsky.social on the history of @theonion.com
- @birdhistory.bsky.social on feather beds of the 1800s

& more!

jodiettenberg.substack.com/p/fifty-three

Hi there - there are no plans so far, but if a Spanish language publisher was to come along I'm sure my agent would be able to make it happen.

“Empire of the Sum” in paperback is my third book this year! 🤯 Read more about it here: shadycharacters.co.uk/books/empire...

I also appreciate that PLATO and Coconet are subjects near to your heart; I have similar interests where I get frustrated if a book or other work omits something that I think is important. But that doesn't make those omissions a "hole" in the story - just an alternative choice.

If there are future editions where I can revise and expand the book, great. If not, I'm still happy with the history that I put together. To my knowledge, PLATO was not a significant influence on emoji history, and Matt Sephton's work puts Japan's emoji earlier than Coconet.

Honestly, there is no script. I wrote the best history of emoji I could in the space I had available. I also needed to cover current usage and potential future developments. I appreciate there are other aspects of emoji history that you're interested in, but the line had to be drawn somewhere.

One more thing, to respond to your original post: the book doesn't say Japan invented emoji. It originated the name and their modern incarnation (c. mid 1980s, if not before), but the book is clear that similar phenomena existed beforehand, even if none of them were as popular or as influential.

On the second sentiment, I would agree with you if i thought that that was what I had done; as it is, I'm happy that I collected a number of obscure historical threads together in a way which I don't think has been done before.

I agree with the first sentiment. Even so, I *did* continue to revise the historical section right up to my deadline. Matt Sephton's discoveries were antedating Japan's history of electronic emoji even as I was writing.

(So much for "lastly"!) There just wasn't room to write about every influence on emoji, so I had to focus on those which other emoji experts have identified as being most relevant. And even then, I didn't have enough pages to devote as much attention to them all as I would have liked.

Lastly, I think I've seen you mention Coconet before, but it was something that came up during my research at all. As such, again, I'm not sure it is broadly considered to have been an influence on the development of emoji.

I'm also unsure how widespread its influence was. Many systems could create facelike symbols, but not all of them were influential enough to be considered emoji predecessors.

Hi Brian - I'm aware of PLATO (I'd love to write about it one day), and I'm aware of the symbols it was possible to create with it, but I don't think they're in a direct line of descent to emoji. (@emojipedia.org might be able to add more detail.)

Hi Bryan - sorry to hear it! What's missing?

The Emoji Tongue - Longreads If 😂 was a word, would that make emoji a language?

Do emoji constitute a language? If so, what are its rules of grammar?

@keithhouston.bsky.social dives into the linguistics of the pictograms that decorate our digital conversations in a new book, excerpted at @longreads.com

longreads.com/2025/07/01/e...