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A couple of years ago, I frequently found myself driving past a roadside ice cream stand under construction. For weeks, the roof of this stand, a gigantic white swirl of fiberglass soft serve, sat on the ground next to the structure, waiting to be lowered onto the finished, cone-shaped building with a crane. I know what it was supposed to represent, but every time I glimpsed it, my instinctive first thought was There's a giant poop emoji. Keith Houston's history of emoji, Face With Tears of Joy, argues that emoji have "become so ubiquitous in our writing, so quotidian, that we should be talking about them in the same breath as grammar or punctuation." I don't know about grammar, which seems as fundamental to language, spoken and written, as words themselves.