Friday fun with emoji

I’m a couple of days late with this nod to April Fool’s Day fun. The folks at Google Chrome helped us celebrate with this tongue-in-cheek video about emoji, which the Oxford Dictionaries say originated in the 1990s from Japanese: e ‘picture’ + moji ‘letter, character’.

Believe it or not. Moby Dick has actually been translated into emoji. See for yourself in this PBS video. You’ll also learn that the origin of emoticons is older than you think.

Thanks to linguist Ben Zimmer for his post on the topic. I’ve got a queue of posts on crafting a genre in the works. But my day job is interfering with my blogging productivity.