Katy Steinmetz, “The Emoji’s Strange Power” (Time, July 17, 2014)
“It’s easy to write them off as just silly little smiley faces or thumbs-up,” says sociolinguist Ben Zimmer, the executive producer of Vocabulary.com. “But there’s an awful lot of people who are very interested in treating them seriously.” …
“Many people have hoped for something that was both a language and beyond anything we know as language,” says Zimmer. “With emoji, that’s more of a possiblity. It’s just a question of what we do with it.”
Read the rest here (for subscribers).