In a recent article in The Wall Street Journal, Joanna Stern talks about the pleasure of expressing herself in emoji, what some have called emoticons. She has learned to write entire sentences in the format.
"Emoji" is derived from two Japanese words, "e" meaning "picture" and "moji" meaning "character." and the emoji system amounts to a pictographic or ideographic writing system. It was created by Shigetaka Kurita in 1998. Emoji has not yet developed into a full language and lacks a consistent grammar and syntax. The characters are different on different operating systems. An attraction of the use of emoji is that it can be mutually understood by people whose spoken languages are different.
The Wall Street Journal article made me wonder if a Christian message could be written in emoji. I thought the idea was silly, but apparently other people have had the same idea and there are now sets of Christian emoji available.