Were you ever put through a slide show of someone’s holiday snaps? Well, my family and I visited Egypt in February and I am now a clear-eyed Egypt booster who has been telling anyone who will listen how fascinating a trip it was. Lacking a Kodak slide projector, I’ve written a few (thousand) words about our experiences. The post is up at the test version of shadycharacters.co.uk: you can read it here and leave comments here.
I plan to switch to the new version of Shady Characters soon, so please let me know if you notice any issues with the new site.
As I mentioned last time, I’ve been working on a new version of blog that doesn’t rely on WordPress. That new version is just about ready to go, and I’d love to get your thoughts on it before I switch over to it permanently. A preview is available at https://staging.shadycharacters.co.uk, if you want to take a look; everything should look and work much as it does at the moment, although commenting, newsletter subscriptions and the contact page are now handled via email rather than in-page forms.
Please have a poke around and let me know what you think! If you find broken links, or images, or formatting — anything at all, really, that doesn’t seem right — please let me know in the comments here or over at the new place.
Look: I am just a blogger. I can write about punctuation, or emoji, or books, or calculators, and I can hope that my readers will enjoy it. I can post about interesting things I’ve read or watched and hope that someone else will find them interesting too. And that’s great! I never imagined I’d still be doing this (and still taking pleasure from it!) a decade and a half after I started. Nor did I imagine that blogging would give me the chance to write and publish one book, let alone four of them, but it did.
But as 2025 rolls over into 2026, the happiness I take from blogging seems a little hollow in comparison to events in the wider world. I suspect I needn’t go into what those events are — if you have a TV, a newspaper or a smartphone, then you are already very well aware, and, moreover, it would be understandable if you preferred not be reminded at all — but for me, the spite, the hate and the intolerance that drive current events are becoming increasingly hard to ignore.
My power to do much of anything about all of this is limited. But even so, I’ve decided to make a couple of changes to the Shady Characters media empire™ to avoid actively making things worse. First, I will be deleting my accounts on X/Twitter. I hadn’t used them for some time, but X’s descent into free-speech absolutism reached a predictable and abhorrent nadir with the recent CSAM scandal, and I cannot in good conscience leave those accounts in place. I’ll be deleting them in the next thirty days. If you’d like to follow me elsewhere, look for me on Mastodon and Bluesky.
Separately, and time permitting, I plan to move the Shady Characters blog off WordPress. There are technical reasons for doing so, but there’s also the fact that WordPress’s co-founder, Matt Mullenweg, seems to be speed-running his transformation into a dictatorial tech CEO. Mullenweg has a talent for picking distasteful fights: in 2025, his main company got rid of three hundred employees who disagreed with him about a petulant lawsuit against another company; in 2024, he publicly chastised a transgender Tumblr user amid allegations of transphobic moderation policies. Mullenweg is no Elon Musk, but he is starting to show the symptoms, and I would prefer not to be a data point which supports WordPress’s numbers.
Honestly, neither of these changes amount to much. This is only a blog, after all. But taking a small stand feels better than doing nothing, and, in the end, I’ll still be blogging and I hope you’ll still be reading. Thanks for your support!
Welcome to the 2025 Shady Characters advent calendar! I’ll be counting down to Christmas by way of ten of the most interesting, controversial, and downright odd emoji to have appeared on our screens. Enjoy, and come back every other day or so for a new entry!
Day 10, and we are at the end of this year’s Shady Characters advent calendar! Today, to answer, belatedly, a question asked by Larry Hosken, we’re looking at PERSON WITH FOLDED HANDS (🙏).
Per John Kelly at Emojipedia, and in common with some of the other emoji we’ve seen in this series, PERSON WITH FOLDED HANDS looks a little different now to its original form. It was one of the earliest emoji to make it out of Japan, when Apple made it available on the iPhone in 2008, but even then it was unclear how best to draw it. One school, headed by Japanese mobile operator Softbank, held that the emoji should show two hands pressed together in the same way as today’s version. The other, led by Softbank’s competitor KDDI AU, showed a person, not just a pair of hands, with their head bowed in thought or prayer and their hands pressed or clasped in front.1 Both versions persisted for some time, with the latter finally dying out between 2015 and 2017.2
It was around the same time, too, that the meaning of PERSON WITH FOLDED HANDS seemed to change. Before then, ‘🙏’ had been used mostly as a gesture of prayer, praise or gratitude. Then, in 2014, it became fair game to use it as a high-five gesture instead.3,4 It seems plain enough where this new interpretation came from — after all, ‘🙏’ isn’t an unreasonable depiction of a high-five — and it is a sign of emoji’s flexibility that PERSON WITH FOLDED HANDS can sustain two such different meanings.1 (Neither of which, it should be noted, have anything much to do with the emoji’s formal name.)
Before we wrap up this year’s advent calendar, I want to use ‘🙏’ in its original sense: I want to thank you, the readers of the Shady Characters blog, for coming back year after year and for buying the books I’ve been lucky enough to be able to write.
2025 has been a challenging year, not least because my day job at Blackford Analysis came within a hair’s breadth of being made redundant in October. Many of my colleagues — friends, really — were not so lucky, which is why it’s gratifying to see that many of them have since landed new jobs elsewhere. And it’s why it was doubly pleasing to be able to catch up with so many of them, as you can see below, at the launch of Face with Tears of Joy at my local bookshop, Far From the Madding Crowd. If for no other reason than that, ‘🙏’ seems like the perfect emoji with which to wish you all a merry Christmas and a happy New Year.
Current and former colleagues at the launch of Face with Tears of Joy at Far From the Madding Crowd in Linlithgow, Scotland. (Photo courtesy of Sandra Küntzel.)
Welcome to the 2025 Shady Characters advent calendar! I’ll be counting down to Christmas by way of ten of the most interesting, controversial, and downright odd emoji to have appeared on our screens. Enjoy, and come back every other day or so for a new entry!
This emoji (), which may or may not appear correctly on your device,* is called FACE WITH BAGS UNDER EYES. It’s a relative newcomer, gaining the Unicode stamp of approval only in 2024,1 and has been rolling out gradually across computers, smartphones and applications since then. Thanks to the vagaries of software update schedules, this means it is entirely possible that your current device is showing you a “missing character” symbol (‘▯’ or similar) rather than a tired-looking emoji face. Only by observing an emoji can we discover its true state.
That emoji can have this kind of quantum unknowability about them is interesting enough in itself, and we’ll come back to that later, but first I want to talk about another of FACE WITH BAGS UNDER EYES’ notable qualities: namely, its popularity. Or perhaps its unpopularity. It’s hard to tell. We’re still in Schrödinger territory.
Earlier this year, under its “World Emoji Awards” banner, Emojipedia named FACE WITH BAGS UNDER EYES as the most popular new emoji of 2025.2 But what exactly does “popular” mean?
Once upon a time, there was little argument. A site called emojitracker.com used a consider amount of technical wizardry3,4 to present a live leaderboard of all emoji used on Twitter, its scores ticking upwards every time an emoji was tweeted. It was a glorious, glittering thing: Twitter was the buzziest social network out there, and its firehose of new tweets made it the perfect place to track emoji usage. According to emojitracker’s maker, Matthew Rothenberg, by 2015 the Unicode Consortium itself was using his site to gauge the likely popularity of proposed emoji.4 And speaking personally, for me emojitracker was the very embodiment of the concept of emoji popularity; there were few other ways to gain such a direct insight into how emoji were being used in practice.
Then, in 2023, emojitracker stopped working.
Admittedly, the site was already lagging behind the times. Rothenberg had not updated emojitracker’s list of supported emoji for some years, so that many newer emoji never made it onto the emojitracker leaderboard.5 Then, early in 2023, a post-acquisition Twitter shut off the data feeds that made emojitracker possible, and emojitracker’s downfall was complete.6,7 Diminished though it was, it was still a shock for the foremost emoji popularity meter to be brought down so suddenly.
As of July 2025, however, emojitracker is back. But its notion of popularity has shifted, and not in a small way. Now part of the Emojipedia empire, the new emojitracker measures the number of times that Emojipedia’s users have copied any given emoji for use elsewhere6,8 — and this is the race which FACE WITH BAGS UNDER EYES won in order to be named the most popular emoji of 2025.
It isn’t entirely clear how emojitracker’s new algorithm will stack up to the older one. But a moment’s thought suggests it will favour both newer emoji (with which users are not yet familiar) and also older but less common emoji (with which they were never familiar). The reported popularity of the more mundane emoji in day-to-day use may suffer in comparison.
This is not necessarily bad. I’m glad that emojitracker works again! But it does highlight something about emoji that I think is easy to forget: for all that one might want to think about emoji in an objective way (what does this emoji mean? How is it used? How popular is it?), it is increasingly difficult to do so. Popularity differs depending on how one measures it, if it is even possible to measure it at all. Appearance differs depending on which device you are using, as FACE WITH BAGS UNDER EYES demonstrates. And as we’ve seen throughout this series, an emoji’s meaning can change depending on where you live, how old you are, your profession, or even your political leanings.
More and more, in other words, emoji are becoming like other languages and scripts — shifting and changing in the hands of their users, and in the hands of those who control their means of distribution. What is the most popular emoji? I’m not sure anyone can tell you. What does it mean? Ditto. These are the kinds of questions that give you bags under your eyes.
