It’s been a while since I crossed off some of the book-related items on my to-do list, so here are a few recent links worth talking about. “Brazilian Caracara Eagle (Robert Havell Jr.) (After John James Audubon), M10298,” Harvard Art Museums collections online, Jul 24, 2026, https://hvrd.art/o/312043 . I write in The Book about John James Audubon’s The Birds of America , a massive artistic,…
It was impossible, I found, when writing Face with Tears of Joy , to get a response to questions or interview requests out of Google, Apple, Meta and the other big emoji vendors. (A lone author writing a book on a twenty-year-old technology probably doesn’t move the PR needle a great deal for companies like these. In hindsight, I probably should have begun my email subject lines with the word “ AI…
As we saw last time round, emoji is young and still changing. And while punctuation may be much older, it, too, is still very much subject to change. Here are a few recent links to bear that out. Google’s Gboard keyboard, as of May 2026, with comma and full stop keys still in place. (Keith Houston) If you use an Android phone, there’s a decent chance you’re also using Google’s “Gboard” keyboard…
A bumper emoji miscellany this week to celebrate Shady Characters ’ new platform ! I’ll be publishing miscellany on other subjects in the coming weeks, but for now, let’s get started. First, Finnish readers might be interested in this article about emoji by Oskari Onninen. Oskari looks into the meaning and use of ‘🤠’, along with emoji in general; I talked to him as part of his research, and he…
I’ve been telegraphing this for a while now , but the new Shady Characters is out of its beta phase. What you see now at shadycharacters.co.uk is, I hope, faster and more accessible version of the site that preserves the appearance and content of the old one. It pains me to admit that I’ve been working on this for almost four years (!), and things have changed a bit since then. My wife and I had…
As I wrote last month , I’ll soon be launching a new version of Shady Characters . Specifically, I will be replacing the current version on or around Friday 17th April. You can preview the new site at https://staging.shadycharacters.co.uk ; with luck, it should look more or less identical to the current version. That said, a few things will change: Comments will be handled by email . When you…
This February my family and I visited Egypt for the first time. We were fortunate to be able to go; it was an amazing trip to a fascinating country, and, of course, there was more than a little of interest for Shady Characters readers. Here are a few words and pictures about the trip. Cairo We arrived at Cairo airport after dark, with two tired but wakeful kids in tow, and, eventually, found our…
As I mentioned last time , I’ve been working on a new version of blog that doesn’t rely on WordPress. That new version is just about ready to go, and I’d love to get your thoughts on it before I switch over to it permanently. A preview is available at https://staging.shadycharacters.co.uk , if you want to take a look; everything should look and work much as it does at the moment, although…
Look: I am just a blogger. I can write about punctuation, or emoji, or books, or calculators, and I can hope that my readers will enjoy it. I can post about interesting things I’ve read or watched and hope that someone else will find them interesting too. And that’s great! I never imagined I’d still be doing this (and still taking pleasure from it!) a decade and a half after I started. Nor did I…
🙏 PERSON WITH FOLDED HANDS, aka Unicode code point 0x1F64F . Day 10, and we are at the end of this year’s Shady Characters advent calendar! Today, to answer, belatedly, a question asked by Larry Hosken , we’re looking at PERSON WITH FOLDED HANDS (🙏). Read more →
FACE WITH BAGS UNDER EYES, aka Unicode code point 0x1FAE9 . This emoji (), which may or may not appear correctly on your device, * is called FACE WITH BAGS UNDER EYES. It’s a relative newcomer, gaining the Unicode stamp of approval only in 2024, 1 and has been rolling out gradually across computers, smartphones and applications since then. Thanks to the vagaries of software update schedules,…
🔫 PISTOL, aka Unicode code point 0x1F52B . Ho ho ho! Nothing says Christmas like a water pistol, am I right? I will admit that as I sat down to write this post a good eight to ten months after first planning it out, it had not occurred to me at the time just how jarring the juxtaposition would be. The ironic thing, however, is that however bouba and kiki water pistols and Christmases may be, they…
🕴️ PERSON IN SUIT LEVITATING, aka Unicode code point 0x1F574 . Every now and again an emoji appears that makes the reader say “What is this? Why is it here? Who thought this was a good idea?” It is in the spirit of both asking and answering such questions that I give you ‘🕴️’, or PERSON IN SUIT LEVITATING. Read more →
🏳️🌈 RAINBOW FLAG, aka Unicode code points (deep breath now) 0x1F3F3 0xFE0F 0x200D and 0x1F308 . RAINBOW FLAG contains multitudes. Multitudes of Unicode characters, that is, because ‘🏳️🌈’ is conjured into existence only if four other characters are placed in order, one after another. 1 Nor is it the only such flag, or even the only such emoji; a surprisingly large number of emoji comprise two…
✨ SPARKLES, aka Unicode code point 0x2728 . If you spend even a modest proportion of your time online, you have almost certainly come across the SPARKLES emoji (✨). It’s a cheery and versatile symbol, and it is increasing found outside emoji’s usual habitat of text messages and social networks. Of late, in fact, SPARKLES has taken on a new gig that promises to significantly boost its profile, if…
👍 THUMBS UP, aka Unicode code point 0x1F44D . If the onsen emoji (♨️) and the hamburger (🍔) show us the nuts and bolts of how emoji work, THUMBS UP (👍) shows us how we, emoji’s users, put our own stamp on them. That’s because ‘👍’ is a chameleon and a provocateur, with meanings that can vary widely depending on how old you are and where you use it. Read more →
🍔 HAMBURGER, aka Unicode code point 0x1F354 . In most ways, the HAMBURGER emoji is quite boring. It’s been around since emoji’s Japanese heyday, when it appeared on phones from all of Japan’s big cellphone networks, and it was one of the first emoji to be adopted for use in the wider world. 1 Early documents show that ‘🍔’ was intended to represent both hamburgers specifically (ハンバーガー, or…
♨️ HOT SPRINGS, aka Unicode code points 0x2668 and 0xFE0F . You would be forgiven for wondering what, exactly, this emoji (♨️) is meant to represent. Well, if the title has not already given the game away, I will tell you: this is the HOT SPRINGS emoji, 1 and in emoji terms at least, it is positively antediluvian. Not only that, but ‘♨️’ gives us a peek behind the Unicode curtain – Unicode being…
😂 FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY, aka Unicode code point 0x1F602 . You know this guy, right? FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY, also known as the “cry-laugh” emoji, has been the most commonly-used emoji in the world for much of its existence. Barring a brief fall from grace during the Covid-19 pandemic in favour of ‘😭’ (and let’s face it, we didn’t have quite as much to be joyful about back them), 1 ‘😂’ has been…
Image courtesy of Mignon Fogarty. (admin) I’ve been internet acquaintances with Mignon Fogarty, also known as Grammar Girl, for many years now. (We share a literary agent, in fact, which is perhaps the most New Yorker –coded thing I’ve ever typed.) As such, I was more than happy to talk to Mignon about Face with Tears of Joy for her always fascinating podcast. That episode has been out for a…
There is a new AI controversy in town: chatbots are ruining the em dash. Over the past year or so, a number of people have decided that texts created by generative AI applications contain more em dashes than might otherwise be expected. The complainants come from LinkedIn, 1 Reddit, 2 Instagram, 3 and beyond. There’s even a thread on a forum operated by OpenAI itself, 4 the company which owns…
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It has been a busy few weeks! Face with Tears of Joy was published back on the 1 st of July in the US and on the 17 th everywhere else. I’ve been lucky enough to talk and write about the book in a number of different venues, and for the book itself to be reviewed in a variety of places. Here’s a quick round-up of it all. First up was a chat with Roman Mars on 99% Invisible , one of my favourite…
Back in the mists of time, I wrote about a peculiar property of words called Zipf’s Law. The idea is quite simple: the frequency at which different words occur in any large body of work, ordered from the most common to the least common, follows a predictable pattern. This is true across languages, and even in some texts, such as that in the Voynich Manuscript, that we haven’t yet deciphered. 1 In…
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First: can I interest you in a periodic table of emoji ? As I wrote last time , I had a lot of fun putting one together and I hope you’ll get a kick out of it too. If you scroll past the table itself, you’ll find copious details on what it is, how it works, and why I put together. The invention of the numeric telephone keypad will be a familiar subject to long-time readers of Shady Characters ,…
I have made a thing! Head over to emoji.shadycharacters.co.uk to peruse the Shady Characters Periodic Table of Emoji. What do I mean by a periodic table of emoji? Well, I answer that question in some detail in the notes under the table itself , but briefly, I wanted to see if I could use a table to tell us something about how emoji are perceived. Which emoji are positive? Which are negative? Which…
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I’ve always really enjoyed 99% Invisible , Roman Mars’ long-running podcast about design, which makes it all the more special to have appeared on three different episode in the past – on the octothorpe (#) , the interrobang (‽) , and pocket calculators respectively. Now, to mark the publication of Face with Tears of Joy , I’m pleased to say that I’m on it again! Read more →
Please allow me to introduce the cover of my next book, Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji ! Face with Tears of Joy " loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://shadycharacters.co.uk/image/LrP3GaAOCd-256.jpeg" width="1200" height="1200" srcset="https://shadycharacters.co.uk/image/LrP3GaAOCd-256.jpeg 256w, https://shadycharacters.co.uk/image/LrP3GaAOCd-512.jpeg 512w,…
Emoji have been in the news recently for a host of reasons, most of them bad – but all of them, I would submit, worthy of our attention. First up is a Netflix series called Adolescence that has been garnering plaudits in the UK and elsewhere since it went on air last month. I won’t spoil the plot, but I note that Emojipedia has joined the clamour with a blog post titled “ Netflix’s ‘Adolescence’,…
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I’m almost ashamed to say it, but I never really gave the backslash a second thought. The backslash’s forward-leaning counterpart is everywhere, especially in computing. It lives in network and web addresses such as ; in file paths, such as /home/keith ; and it introduces human-readable “comments” in any number of programming languages, often like /* this */ or // this . But the backslash? It’s a…
I came across a post last July on Emojipedia , in which Keith Broni * noted that Twitter, or X, had redesigned its PISTOL emoji. PISTOL had always been controversial: most online platforms started off with PISTOLs drawn as realistic firearms, but, over the course of the mid-2010s, most of them moved to toylike renderings of water pistols instead. Twitter had followed suit. Read more → * From…
In October 2023, the UK government passed into law the Online Safety Act , a set of regulations intended to make online services more responsible for the content they carry. It is a laudable aim, but unfortunately the distinctions the Act draws between large sites such as Facebook and Google and smaller sites such as this one are insufficiently well defined. The upshot is that complying with the…
I’ve had nuclear energy on the mind recently – a product of watching Oppenheimer , perhaps, and also the UK government’s newfound interest in nuclear power in the interest of combatting climate change. Apropos of all that, then, I was happy to appear on a recent episode of AMSEcast , the podcast of the American Museum of Science and Energy in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The episode was hosted by the…
There is something interesting happening with blogging. For a long time, blogs like this one were the way to opine, to share, to bloviate. Then social media came along and stole blogging’s thunder, with the average blogger gravitating towards long threads on Twitter ( RIP ; † ⚰; 💀; etc., etc.) or photo-heavy Instagram posts. Next came newsletters – blogs delivered by email, essentially – which…
Hello, and welcome to 2025. Is it that time already? The possessive apostrophe (or rather, the abuse of the possessive apostrophe) is a recurrent guest star here at Shady Characters , but usually in the English language. Recently, though, the Guardian reported that unneeded apostrophes are infecting German, too. The so-called Deppenapostroph , or “idiot’s apostrophe”, appears when a…
It’s that time of the year again! You: a discerning reader of books about unconventional information technologies ( unusual marks of punctuation , say, or pocket calculators ). Your friends and family: the same, naturally. But what gifts to give them this holiday season? I am here to help. And because I am still very much on a calculator jag, we will be concentrating on some of the best pocket…
I know, I know; these days, everyone and their five-legged, three-eyed dog is writing a piece about AI . I can’t promise that this one will be more insightful or educational than any of the others, but I can promise that it will invoke humanity’s undimmable hubris, the atomic bomb, mad cow disease, and, to keep us on brand, books. 1. Loomings You will be aware, by now, of the cresting wave of…
Having dispatched punctuation and book news , we’re on to pocket calculators! Incredibly, half a century or more after their appearance, there is still news to be had on the subject. In the introduction to Empire of the Sum , I mention that like some other animals, ravens and other corvids are known to be able to count. Not only that, but they understand the concept of zero, which is something…
In the second of this miniseries of post-deadline catch-ups ( the first dealt with punctuation ), I’ve collected some links on the subject of books. First is a recent exhibition at Harvard’s Houghton Library, called “ Marks in Books ”, that has, sadly, run its course. But John Overholt , a curator of early books and manuscripts at Houghton, writes to say that the exhibit was adapted from a 1984…
And you’re back in the room! I recently submitted the manuscript for my next book, Face with Tears of Joy: a Natural History of Emoji to my editor, Brendan Curry, at W. W. Norton. This one was a bit of a whirlwind: Empire of the Sum was published less than a year ago, so writing time has been short. Add in a recent relocation from Birmingham, England to Linlithgow, Scotland ( the birthplace of…
I’m still pinching myself, but recently I had the distinct pleasure on appearing on Clear and Vivid podcast , hosted by the great Alan Alda . I knew of Alan’s work as an actor and writer from the likes of M*A*S*H * , of course, but I hadn’t known that in recent years he has moved into the world of science communication, not least with the foundation of the Alan Alda Center for Communicating…
The following was published in issue 13 of MacGuffin Magazine . It recapitulates some of the contents of my interrobang series and adds some new details to boot. Enjoy! The Speckters lived in a postwar apartment near Gramercy Park in Manhattan. Their collection of printing presses lived in a rented apartment across the hall, a three-thousand-pound Columbian press balanced carefully across the…