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As with all languages, English is in a constant state of flux. New terminology, slang expressions, and catchphrases are continually broadening vocabularies and communication styles. Many of these coinages are ephemeral, whereas others prove to have staying power.
What seems different about 21st-century English is the speed with which these changes spread and are adopted—at least temporarily—by language users of all ages. Historically, language change was driven by younger speakers and spread relatively slowly from group to group, but social media has greatly accelerated this process of linguistic diffusion.
Two new books, both published in July, address these changes but differ in their approach. One looks backward and explores the history of emoji, whereas the other looks toward a future governed by social media influencers and algorithmic content moderation.
Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji, by Keith Houston
Among other works, Scottish author Keith Houston has written the delightful Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks, published in 2013. (If you don’t know your pilcrow from your manicule, then this is the book for you.)
In his latest offering, Houston traces the genealogy of emoji (Japanese for “picture character”). From their ancestral origins in “typewriter art” (dating from 1898!) through the creation of “emoticons” like ;-), to their modern incarnations—the extended catalog of crying and grinning facial contortions—the author surefootedly guides the reader through emoji’s evolutionary past and into the present day.
In many ways, the profusion of emoji has become an embarrassment of riches. The current Unicode Consortium standard (version 17) contains nearly 4,000 of these pictograms, and their communicative value is questionable: As I’ve written here and here, a lack of consensus about their precise meanings has proven to be problematic.
For those seeking a deep dive into the origins and development of emoji, Houston’s abundantly illustrated account will both inform and entertain. And in the final chapter, he does look forward to address the unsustainable proliferation of emoji. The various skin tones, genders, common and not-so-common objects, animals, activities, and so on may finally lead to a crisis described as “emojigeddon.”
Nevertheless, they seem to be here to stay. In 2013, for example, emoji migrated from texting apps on smartphones and into Facebook as “feelings and activities.” Productivity apps were next, as Microsoft introduced them into its Office 2016 suite of programs. Apple followed suit, first with an emoji keyboard in 2011 and then via the introduction of user-created “Genmoji” last year. At this point, it’s an emoji-based world, and all of us just live in it.
Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language, by Adam Aleksic
Adam Aleksic has become a well-known content creator, using the online persona of “Etymology Nerd” to discuss language and communication. His Instagram account has 1.6 million followers, with hundreds of thousands more subscribing to his channel on YouTube or following his TikTok posts. Algospeak is his first foray into book-length publishing.
In many respects, Aleksic’s book can be viewed as a successor to Gretchen McCulloch’s Because Internet, published in 2019. Both books provide a wide-ranging survey of the state of online language.
He describes, for example, how the online world has been changed by the use of synonyms or coded words to avoid the content moderation of social media platforms. The use of disfavored words, like “suicide” or “sex,” can result in shadow banning, in which posts are disfavored by algorithmic selection. It can also lead to demonetization—the kiss of death for online influencers.
These workarounds, collectively known as algospeak, involve the use of terms like “unalive” or “seggs” as stand-ins for controversial words or topics. But the algorithms can then be tuned to block the coded terms, leading to the adoption of new codes, and so on. I’ve described this as a linguistic arms race; Aleksic’s preferred term is “linguistic Whac-A-Mole.”
But Algospeak is much more than a description of its titular subject. Its various chapters describe phenomena as diverse as hood irony, incel language, sexual hierarchies, and rhoticity (the latter refers to inserting /r/ into words to drag out their pronunciation).
Unlike Because Internet, however, Algospeak is not presented as a work of scholarship. McCulloch, who has graduate training in linguistics, provides 38 densely formatted pages of notes, underscoring her familiarity with the peer-reviewed research literature on computer-mediated communication. Aleksic, who earned his undergraduate degree at Harvard two years ago, provides just five pages of notes, and many of these are journalistic sources like The Atlantic or The Guardian. But for many readers, this may not be an issue.
Writing about linguistic change can be a parlous affair. As Aleksic acknowledges in Algospeak’s introduction, “As I write this in the fall of 2024, much of the slang that I mention is already outdated. What seems current to me right now might be passé by the time you read this book.”
He raises a valid concern; McCulloch’s Because Internet was published six years ago, and parts of it already read more like a historical artifact than a contemporary account of online communication. As these books make clear, our language continues to be a moving target.
