In November 2015, Oxford Dictionaries announced that their 2015 Word of the Year was the "face with tears of joy" emoji.
The internet collectively freaked out.
But emoji haters, who almost universally lament the characters as the pinnacle of illiteracy, are missing a key point: It hearkens back to the origins of written language.
And no, that doesn't mean emoji are "more primitive," as art critic Jonathan Jones argued in the Guardian last year (using an ethnocentric reading of history that's as unabashedly colonialist as it is outmoded).
When humans first began to use written communication in Mesopotamia around 3,200 BC, it was in images. And sure, it was pretty basic: A picture of a bull meant a bull. (It's possible that much older markings on tortoise shells found in China in 2003 are even earlier proto-writing, but that's still controversial.)
That kind of literal symbolism lasted for a few centuries — but, starting as early as 3,400 BC, cuneiform had spread to Egypt and began to get more abstract. Pictures started to stand in for sounds.
We still do this today in the form of rebus puzzles like this one:
Got it yet? Eye, bee, leaves. I believe.
This isn't the most common use of emoji — it would be in contradiction with their cross-cultural intent. The world imported them from Japan and were never intended to stand in for English or other sounds.
But cuneiform images also started to stand in concepts, like honor or life.
In the brainteaser (also called a rebus) above, "belief" is completely abstract — you can't draw it in a way that would be universally understood. A Japanese-speaking Buddhist's phonetic representation of belief, for example, would likely not be the same as that of an English-speaking Christian.
So in ancient times, rebuses transformed over time and distance, becoming less like direct representation and more like phonetic one. By 2,600 BC, this kind of usage was common. Roughly a century later, a small group adapted hieroglyphics into individual representations of sounds, creating the first alphabetic writing system: Phoenician.
The alphabet-like system, which lacked vowels, spread to Greece through trade, where it became a comprehensive alphabetic system.
So what does this have to do with emoji?
First, ancient languages were needed to be widely understood, even across language groups. While many emoji are culturally specific (particularly to Japan), those that signal emotional tone are pretty easy to understand across languages.
On a deeper level, the idea that words are also concepts is very much like our earlier, pictographic expressions. Abstract concepts can be quickly easily summed up in an icon: Love with a heart; strength with a curled bicep; key for life goals, thanks to DJ Khaled.
They occupy the awkward space between the conceptual and the literal and fill in for non-verbal cues, like facial expression and tone.
Ultimately, though, there's no mollifying the haters. As Steven Pinker writes in the introduction to "The Sense of Style," complaints about the ever-evolving peculiarities of language likely date all the way back ancient Sumeria, where this whole writing thing started in the first place.
And maybe that's the biggest thing emoji share with its early cuneiform predecessors: It's another, perhaps radical, shift in how society and language interact — and once again, it's going to freak people out.
