Back in the mists of time, I wrote about a peculiar property of words called Zipf’s Law. The idea is quite simple: the frequency at which different words occur in any large body of work, ordered from the most common to the least common, follows a predictable pattern. This is true across languages, and even in some texts, such as that in the Voynich Manuscript, that we haven’t yet deciphered.1
It’s publication day again! Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji is published today in the UK and other non-US territories.
You can order a copy from Norton, Amazon, Waterstones, Bookshop.org, Blackwell’s or Topping & Company. (If you’re ever in Linlithgow, Scotland, drop into my local bookshop, Far From the Madding Crowd — I’ll try to sign a few copies for them.)
It’s publication day! Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji is published today in the USA. You can order a copy from Norton, Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Books A Million, Bookshop.org, Hudson, Powell’s, or Walmart.
First: can I interest you in a periodic table of emoji? As I wrote last time, I had a lot of fun putting one together and I hope you’ll get a kick out of it too. If you scroll past the table itself, you’ll find copious details on what it is, how it works, and why I put together.
I have made a thing! Head over to emoji.shadycharacters.co.uk to peruse the Shady Characters Periodic Table of Emoji.
What do I mean by a periodic table of emoji? Well, I answer that question in some detail in the notes under the table itself, but briefly, I wanted to see if I could use a table to tell us something about how emoji are perceived. Which emoji are positive? Which are negative? Which ones convey sentiments that match their appearances, and which deviate from them?