Emojis: A New Language? Nah.

In this episode, Josh and Chuck dive into the surprisingly fascinating history of emojis, from their origins as simple emoticons in the early 1980s to becoming a nearly universal form of digital communication used by 92% of people online. They trace the journey from Scott Falman's colon-parenthesis smiley face in 1982 through Japan's pioneering work in the 1990s with engineer Shigetaka Kurita, who created the first actual emojis and coined the term itself, all the way to today's standardized emoji sets managed by the Unicode Consortium. Along the way, they explore the quirky cultural debates around emoji design, discuss whether emoji might actually constitute a developing language, and unpack how these tiny pictures have become a genuinely important tool for adding context and emotion to plain text communication.