The strange appeal of pandemic emoji

News that Apple has updated its emoji range to include pictograms specific to the pandemic may either disgust you or inspire you to send a volley of missives out immediately. As an emojiste, I am in the latter camp. I am delighted that I now have a bandaged heart, a dizzy face with spiral eyes, a face exhaling with exhaustion and, of course, a bloodless syringe in my emoji lexicon. My nearest and dearest WhatsApp interlocutors may groan but I simply don’t care. Far from an erosion of linguistic standards, I see emojis as an exciting semiotic advance. I only wish that Roland Barthes, the grand French semiotician of the last century, were around to decode it all.

Emoji, which originated in Japan in the 90s, can be used in different ways. Linguists count several different common functions of emoji, although there are always freestylers in any linguistic code. Firstly, there is the idea of substitution: a picture says a thousand words and can replace text entirely. In